*Biden Lobbyist Is Fighting Measures to Crack Down on Foreign Election Influence“It is rather disconcerting that Biden frequently embraces K Street and major donors for his campaign, but it is particularly troubling that Biden would turn to the lobbying firm of the Fair FARA Coalition for fundraising purposes. This Coalition’s lobbying firm is dedicated to undermining some of the major clean-government reforms proposed by H.R. 1 and to opposing enhanced transparency of lobbying efforts by foreign agents.”

​*Tax breaks usually go to people who own their homes. Cory Booker has another idea.​​(ARTICLE BELOW)

​*If Pete Buttigieg Is the “Opposition” to Trump, We Are Screwed(ARTICLE BELOW)​*Sanders calls for bans on mass raids and for-profit detention centers — and condemns Trump’s ‘racist attacks on immigrants’​​​​​(ARTICLE BELOW)

*Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Help Black Students Get Ahead​​​​(ARTICLE BELOW)

Warren Proposes the Biggest Expansion of Social Security in 50 Years

THE PLAN, WITH AN IMMEDIATE $200 PER MONTH BENEFIT INCREASE, SETS THE LEFT EDGE OF THE POSSIBLE ON A BEDROCK DEMOCRATIC PROGRAM

DAVID DAYEN - the american prospectSEPTEMBER 12, 2019

I​n November 2013, less than a year into Elizabeth Warren’s first Senate term, she gave a floor speech rejecting a persistent push, including from her own party’s president, to cut Social Security benefits. Her outspokenness came out of studying the economy and noting the precarious finances of an aging population. “We don’t build a future for our children by cutting basic retirement benefits for their grandparents,” she argued. “With some modest adjustments, we can keep the system solvent for many more years, and could even increase benefits.”

At the time, a few other liberals—Senators Tom Harkin, Sherrod Brown, and Bernie Sanders—had endorsed expanding Social Security, an important protection for a working class struggling to retire with dignity. By joining the fight, Warren helped stave off the march to cuts. What was once the province of a few has become the dominant philosophy in the party. Earlier this year, a Social Security expansion package launched with the support of over 200 House Democrats. And now, Warren is charging ahead with the biggest expansion package a Democrat has proposed in decades.“Despite the data staring us in the face, Congress hasn’t increased Social Security benefits in nearly fifty years,” Warren wrote today in her favorite format, a Medium post. “We need to get our priorities straight.”

She’s doing it because the struggles remain evident, and worse for those nearing retirement than those already in it. For too many people, particularly people of color, Social Security has become the main source of retirement income, as fewer employers offer significant retirement benefits and stagnant wages eat up savings. The median annual income of women over 65 in 2016 was a paltry $18,380. And that’s with many working into their golden years.

A Government Accountability Office report released just this week revealed that poorer seniors had a dramatically lower survival rate than their richer counterparts. Those living into their 70s and 80s tend to rely more on Social Security, but by paying in less throughout their working lives, they receive less in benefits than richer counterparts who need the money less. This inequality doom loop is built into the inputs and outputs of the Social Security system, and Warren seeks to arrest this yawning wealth gap that is literally a matter of life and death.

Former Senator Harkin’s long-standing Social Security bill would merely have changed the cost of living adjustment to better reflect senior citizens’ medical costs. It was estimated to increase benefits by about $60 a month on average. The current Social Security 2100 bill, from Representative John Larson (D-CT), included Harkin’s new cost of living index, plus a minimum monthly benefit at 125 percent of the federal poverty level for low lifetime wage-earners, as well as an across-the-board increase (mainly through adjusting the benefit formula) equivalent to about 2 percent of the average benefit. As a presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders is running on a plan that is broadly similar to Larson’s.

Warren’s plan goes quite a bit further. It includes the cost-of-living adjustment, the minimum monthly benefit, and an across-the-board benefit hike. But that across-the-board jump comes to $200 a month immediately for every current and future recipient, along with several other changes focused on women, caregivers, people with disabilities, and people of color. The $2,400 a year extra for everyone is nearly double what the Larson/Sanders plan gives to its poorest beneficiaries.

An independent analysis from Mark Zandi of Moody’s estimates that the Warren Social Security plan would increase average benefits by almost 25 percent for the lower half of income earners. It would lift 4.9 million seniors out of poverty, slashing the senior poverty rate by over two-thirds. And once it kicks in, it would steadily and modestly grow the economy by putting more money in the hands of seniors who are likely to spend it. “The plan results in a much more progressive Social Security system,” Zandi writes.

Like all Social Security plans, which must be financially stable, the proposal is fully paid for, extending the life of the Social Security Trust Fund by 19 years, out to 2054. (Sanders’s plan has a 52-year solvency, putting more money into maintaining benefits than expansion.) To do this, Warren lifts the cap on payroll taxes for those making above $250,000 per year, and increases that tax above $250,000 by 2.4 percent, split between the employee and employer. It would also for the first time ever add a payroll tax for net investment income, for individuals making $250,000 or more, and families making $400,000.

In effect, this shifts the Social Security system closer to where it was before inequality took off. The payroll tax used to capture 90 percent of wage earnings, and today, because of the cap on earnings above $132,900, it captures only 83 percent. That’s actually far worse, because of the growing shift to capital income, where the wealthy make money by having money. All those earnings normally escape the payroll tax. Inequality is robbing Social Security’s solvency, and the Warren plan rebalances it.

The plan includes a number of smaller tweaks targeted at vulnerable communities. Disability recipients get the $200 per month increase. It gives credit toward lifetime earnings to caregivers assisting a relative, increasing their benefit calculation. Widowers get to choose higher benefits when a spouse dies. State and local public employees who often lose all or most of their Social Security benefits would have them restored. Full-time students and apprentices get enhancements as well.

Nancy Altman of the progressive group Social Security Works praised the proposal in a letter. “Her bold new plan tackles the nation’s looming retirement income crisis head-on, as well as rising income and wealth inequality and the squeeze on working families,” Altman said. “It is a solution for all generations.”

It’s easy to look at Warren’s plans and wonder why Mitch McConnell or Joe Manchin would do anything with them but toss them in the trash. But Social Security has a ticking clock. If nothing is done to shore up its finances, the $3 trillion currently in the Trust Fund will run out by 2035, forcing an immediate 20 percent benefit cut. Given that no politician would want to stick the most reliable voting bloc in America with such a hardship, talks will eventually have to proceed. And the Warren plan sets a yardstick for that negotiation, a left edge of the possible.

What politician wouldn’t like to give their constituents $200 a month while curtailing elderly poverty and extending the life of Social Security by almost two decades? Those shielding the rich, of course. But that’s a clarifying debate to have in an election year.

The proposal serves a similar function as Warren’s speech in 2013, moving the debate to higher ground and changing the politics of the issue bit by bit. Sanders has also played this role on Social Security and many other issues throughout his career, and in the pivotal primary of 2016. Sniping between candidate supporters is now ubiquitous in our social media age. But if you care about the policy—and I would argue that’s all you should care about—you should welcome this game of one-upmanship.

THE DAY AFTER Joe Biden participates in CNN’s climate forum in New York, the former vice president will head to a high-dollar fundraiser co-hosted by a founder of a fossil fuel company.

Andrew Goldman, a co-founder of Western LNG, a natural gas production company based in Houston, Texas, is co-hosting one of two high-dollar fundraisers Biden will attend in New York on Thursday. Western’s major project is a floating production facility off the northern coast of British Columbia designed to provide Canadian gas to markets in northeast Asia.

Goldman and Biden have deep ties: Goldman served as an adviser to Biden while he was in the Senate and was the northeast director of finance for Biden’s 2008 campaign. He’s also an executive at the investment banking firm Hildred Capital Partners. He and his partner at the firm, David Solomon, along with their wives Renee and Sarah, will host a private fundraiser for Biden at the Solomon house, CNBC reported. Goldman also co-founded De Cordova Goldman Capital Management, which invested in “natural resources and energy.”

According to the company’s website, Western deploys “innovative floating liquefaction technology at inland locations, specifically those that have existing pipeline access to natural gas basins.” The group says it’s “opening up markets for these resources, which are stranded behind burgeoning shale production.”

Biden’s climate plan sets a goal of getting the United States to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. The plan cites human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels — like natural gas — as contributing to the greenhouse gas effect, exacerbating climate events, and playing a part in an overall increase in global temperature. Biden initially had proposed a “middle ground” on climate policy. His climate policy adviser, Heather Zichal, meanwhile, made more than a million dollars from a natural gas firm after leaving the Obama administration.

Neither Biden nor Western immediately responded to a request for comment. ​

Scientists say that a recent increase in the amount of methane — a greenhouse gas more than 30 times stronger than carbon dioxide as far as trapping heat — in Earth’s atmosphere has taken place at the same time that the fracking industry has taken off in the U.S. While an increase in natural gas has coincided with a decrease in reliance on coal-powered plants, scientists still say that an electricity grid based on natural gas will continue to make the planet hotter, and ultimately won’t do anything to head off the ongoing climate emergency.

Most new oil and natural gas wells in the U.S. are hydraulically fractured: a process that blasts chemical fluid into deep-rock formations to create fractures that make it easier to access gas and crude oil. Unless otherwise halted, natural gas is projected to provide the majority of electricity in the U.S. by 2050, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization. Natural gas currently provides about 35 percent of electricity generated in the U.S.

The rapid expansion of fracking over the past two decades has caused a drastic drop in prices in some parts of the country — but a shortage in others due to a lack of pipelines to transport it — making it more cost-competitive as compared to other energy resources. But some regions of the country have so much excess gas, some of which is produced as a byproduct of oil drilling, that they’re burning it. That itself releases carbon dioxide, but the process of fracking leaks methane gas. Fracking also requires enormous amounts of water; the U.S. Geological Survey estimates between 1.5 million to 16 million gallons per well.

Renewable energy standards will be among the topics the 10 Democratic presidential candidates will discuss during the seven-hour climate-focused forum on Wednesday evening. Only candidates who qualified for the third round of Democratic primary debates will participate: Biden; former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro; Andrew Yang; South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg; former Rep. Beto O’Rourke; and Sens. Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. Each individual candidate will have around 40 minutes to engage in a town hall-style discussion with CNN moderators and a live audience.

Sanders called for a complete ban on fracking Wednesday afternoon, imploring all other candidates to join him in the proposal he outlined earlier as part of his version of a Green New Deal plan, which builds on the resolution introduced by Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in April.

The Democratic National Committee determined last month not to host a debate focused solely on climate change, despite a series of protests around the country led in part by youth activists with the Sunrise Movement. ​

​Update: September 4, 2019Biden was asked about the fundraiser during the CNN climate town hall, and initially denied that Goldman is a fossil fuel executive. Anderson Cooper followed up to let him know that Goldman was a co-founder of Western LNG, and Biden said he would look into it. Later in the forum, Cooper clarified to Biden that he had been told Goldman doesn’t have “day-to-day” responsibilities at the firm. Biden said that he was told by staff that Goldman “did not have any responsibility related to the company, but if that turns out to be true, then I will not in any way accept his help.”

After the forum, Symone Sanders, a Biden spokesperson, dug in, insisting that Goldman is not really involved with the firm he co-founded. But Splinter News dug up a Canadian filing from last year that asks, “Please briefly identify the other senior management personnel involved with Western.” ​The answer: “Western is managed by a seasoned team of executives experienced in the LNG and related energy infrastructure industries. Western’s co-founder is Andrew Goldman, Chief Investment Officer of Hildred Capital Partners. He is a long-term investor in the liquefied natural gas sector.” An industry press release from 2018 also speaks about Goldman as having a present-tense role in the company and describes him as “a long-term investor in the liquified natural gas sector.” He’s also the second person listed under “leadership” on Western’s site.

Black Democrats overwhelmingly support Joe Biden to be the party's next presidential nominee: poll

While Biden is the No. 1 choice among seniors, Sanders tops the former vice president among millennials

​MATTHEW ROZSA - salonSEPTEMBER 4, 2019 1:06PM (UTC)

A ​new survey reveals that black voters overwhelmingly support former Vice President Joe Biden to be the Democratic Party's next presidential nominee. However, many voters in this crucial bloc also back one of his chief rivals for the nomination: Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

"Joe Biden has amassed a staggering lead among older African-Americans, commanding nearly two-thirds support of black voters 65 and older in the most recent Morning Consult poll," Politico reported on Tuesday. "Bernie Sanders is the favorite of black millennials, though his margin with that group is much smaller. Among all black voters, Biden is leading Sanders, 41 percent to 20 percent."

South Carolina Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton Antjuan Seawright told Politico that the strong showings posted by Biden and Sanders within the African-American community should not be accepted as definitive.

"When you think about Cory Booker, when you think about Kamala Harris, when you think about Elizabeth Warren and others, one thing I've learned is that when you count people out, they usually teach you that you don't know how to count," Seawright explained.

​Booker is a senator from New Jersey, Harris is a senator from California and Warren is a senator from Massachusetts; Warren is well-known for her progressive ideology, while both Booker and Harris have African-American heritage.

"Unlike many white Democratic voters who feel free to indulge in purity tests as they search for a perfect candidate, Black America is pragmatic," DeVega wrote. "To that end, black voters know that removing Donald Trump is the most important goal, much larger than any narrow set of interests. Like any other group, however, black voters are not a hive mind. As Hillary Clinton learned in 2016, black folks' enthusiasm for a given candidate is not fixed. Biden should learn that lesson early, rather than taking the support of black voters for granted and regretting such an error in political calculus later on."

​Biden has aroused controversy for invoking his past willingness to work with segregationists, such as Sens. James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia. In June, he bragged to an audience that "I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me 'boy,' he always called me 'son.' Well guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn't agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today, you look at the other side and you're the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don't talk to each other anymore."

When confronted by Booker about the subtext of his remarks, Biden defended himself by asking, "Apologize for what? Cory should apologize. He knows better. There's not a racist bone in my body. I've been involved in civil rights my whole career."

September 1, 2019 ​By Common Dreams - Raw Story

​At a healthcare-focused town hall in South Carolina Friday—followed by an official campaign statement Saturday—Democratic presidential primary candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders announced he is working on a plan to cancel Americans’ existing past-due medical debt and address future medical debt.

A woman at the town hall stood up and asked, “Is there anything in your plan that would actually work for people that are drowning right now for their medical debt?”

“We’re looking at that right now,” Sanders responded. “In another piece of legislation that we’re going to be offering we will eliminate medical debt in this country. I mean, just stop and think for a second. Why should people be placed in financial duress? For what crime did you commit? You got a serious illness? That is not what this country should be about.”

Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir told CNN on Friday that “Sen. Sanders had previously asked us to pull together a plan to finally end the crisis of medical debt, and when asked directly about it tonight he was honest and candid in previewing his thinking on this important matter.”

Following the town hall, video of the response from presidential hopeful and Independent senator from Vermont circulated online.

“In the United States of America, your financial life and future should not be destroyed because you or a member of your family gets sick,” Sanders added in a statement Saturday. “That is unacceptable.”

“I am sick and tired of seeing over 500,000 Americans declare bankruptcy each year because they cannot pay off the outrageous cost of a medical emergency or a hospital stay,” he said, repeating a statistic that has caused some controversy this week. “In the wealthiest country in the history of the world, 42 percent of Americans should not be losing their entire life savings two years after being diagnosed with cancer.”

​The Sanders presidential campaign, in its statement, detailed the key priorities of his proposal, which will be released sometime in the next month:

Cancel the $81 billion in existing past-due medical debt. Under this plan, the federal government will negotiate and pay off past-due medical bills in collections that have been reported to credit agencies.

Repeal the worst elements of the disastrous 2005 bankruptcy reform bill, and allow other existing and future medical debt to be discharged.

Make sure that no one’s credit score is negatively impacted by unpaid medical bills.

​“The 2005 bankruptcy reform bill written by Wall Street made it much more difficult to discharge medical debt by imposing strict means tests and eliminated fundamental consumer protections for the American people,” the campaign noted. “It also trapped families with medical debt in long-term poverty, mandated that they pay for credit counseling before filing for bankruptcy, and increased the need for expensive legal services when filing a case for medical bankruptcy.”

​A longtime single-payer advocate and lead sponsor of the Medicare for All Act of 2019 in the Senate, Sanders has made addressing the nation’s high healthcare costs a top issue in his bid to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in the 2020 race.

Adam Gaffney, president of the advocacy group Physicians for a National Health Program, tied the senator’s single-payer healthcare legislation to his forthcoming medical debt proposal, tweeting in response to a report on the debt plan Saturday: “Right on. Of course, we wouldn’t have medical debt to begin with under Medicare for All—no medical bills at all, in fact.”

Beto O’Rourke Built His Career on Driving Out Low-Income Mexican Communities

BY Susie Aquilina, TruthoutPUBLISHED August 28, 2019

In the aftermath of the El Paso, Texas, shooting that claimed the lives of 22 people and wounded 25 more, there is no question that white supremacist extremism is boiling over the pot heated by centuries of anti-Mexican violence.

For El Paso Latinos who have been grating under Trump’s brutal rhetoric and policies, there was something both shocking and familiar about the terror that befell our city on one sweltering, desert summer day. We watched in stunned horror as our city became the center of the same old narrative about guns and video games.

Totally absent from this discourse, however, was the context of class warfare that targets low-income Mexican communities for obliteration in El Paso. Over the past three years, the ratcheting up of overt racism aimed at people of Mexican origin is now culminating in bloodshed. But the ongoing and systematic effort by bipartisan, wealthy interests to divest the working-class people of El Paso of their resources, schools and homes precedes Trump.

Organizing to Save El Paso SchoolsDuring mid-summer of this year, Guillermo Glenn would have never expected that, in a month, he would be saving those wounded by the white supremacist shooter who targeted El Paso because of its high concentration of Latinos.

“The overt racism of the Walmart tragedy is very clear, documented by a hate-filled manifesto targeting Mexicans,” Glenn said. “But institutional racism, which has historically plagued El Paso, is more difficult to identify and define.”

In the months leading up to the shooting, Glenn, a lifelong community organizer who has been challenging white supremacy, was supporting Familias Unidas del Chamizal, a group formed to fight the closure of the public school attended by their children, Beall Elementary. The school sits a few thousand feet from the border with Mexico and is the newest campus in the South El Paso neighborhood, built many decades after its counterparts. Its enrollment numbers were also the highest in this area, high enough to meet the number of students required by the El Paso Independent School District (EPISD) to remain open.

Parents of children attending Beall were therefore baffled as to why this school, which is located in a residential zone and surrounded by neighborhood amenities, was chosen for closure among others in the district. Students would be forced to go to one of the two nearest schools, both having lower enrollment numbers. One campus is feet from the international highway which is packed daily with heavy traffic spewing large amounts of pollution into the air, and the other school is located directly across the street from an industrial waste facility that recycles trash, including batteries, electronics and metals from Juárez, Mexico, and is not bound to high standards of environmental regulation.

Residents of Barrio Chamizal, the neighborhood that Beall served, had prevented the EPISD board from closing Beall for four years, and when the board was finally able to do so, it was without any transparency or accountability to the community.

Familias Unidas del Chamizal pursued board members and EPISD administrators seeking redress for their frustration caused by the environmental racism their children were to face by spending every day on a heavily polluted campus. The board ignored their pleas and offered half-hearted explanations that never addressed why they reached their decision to close the neighborhood’s newest, cleanest, most well-attended school. Throughout 2018 and much of 2019, Familias Unidas del Chamizal organized, protested and even went on a hunger strike to pressure the board to overturn its ruling.

“The institutional racism by the school board is expressed by dismantling schools that had 97 percent immigrant children and moving them to unsafe, environmentally questionable schools,” Glenn said.

EPISD touts the closure of Beall as part of its “Rightsizing for the Future” initiative. As seen in many cities throughout the United States, this attempt to rebrand the defunding of public education is a means to divest low-income communities of essential, much-needed resources while attempting to slap a “practical” and “efficient” face on the insidious practice.

Such policies reduce the number of schools and teachers, encourage hiring freezes and diminish teachers’ rights by heightening their disposability. These policies also overstuff classrooms with unwieldy student-to-teacher ratios, and promote charterization and privatization. It is working-class people and communities of color who bear the brunt of these policies.

Perhaps just as troubling as the larger national agenda to abolish public education is the broader context of gentrification out of which the decision to eliminate Beall from Barrio Chamizal emerged. The board’s ruling coincides with work that city leaders have been doing for years to expel the neighborhood’s working poor.

Barrio Chamizal boasts one of the highest concentrations of immigrant residents in the country, and its members also suffer from the most severe levels of poverty. Since at least 2016, urban planners and the Housing Authority of the City of El Paso have been working to “revitalize” the area by closing historic housing projects and forcing low-income Mexicans out of the barrio by raising property values. Of course, the so-called benevolent intention of “cleaning up” the neighborhood is the stated reason for these efforts, but the outcome would fundamentally be the erasure an entire community.

Fighting for El Paso NeighborhoodsBarrio Chamizal is not the only neighborhood facing destruction by powerful interests in El Paso. Duranguito, a historic neighborhood roughly two miles southwest of Beall, was put on the chopping block when city leaders and wealthy developers put forth a plan to build a massive arena in downtown El Paso in 2016.

The arena was the latest in a decades-long endeavor to gentrify the city’s downtown, one that involved current democratic presidential candidate Rep. Beto O’Rourke in its early stages. Long before his Senate run against Ted Cruz that earned him national acclaim, O’Rourke’s first political gig was sitting on the El Paso City Council. To local activists, he is best remembered for his support to transform the city’s downtown by driving out low-income residents and demolishing traditionally immigrant neighborhoods.

In 2006, El Paso millionaire and real estate developer Bill Sanders spearheaded the campaign to evict thousands of mostly elderly people of Mexican origin who had made the downtown area their home after immigrating to the U.S. a generation ago, in order to replace the barrio with an entertainment and retail district.

Despite being married to Sanders’s daughter, O’Rourke refused to recuse himself from a city council vote in 2008 that would allow the use of eminent domain in forcing these residents from their homes to allow the downtown redevelopment plan to be realized. For years, a battle ensued between El Paso’s wealthy business class and the working-class Latinos of the city’s downtown, and throughout this struggle, O’Rourke stood firmly on the side of El Paso’s mostly white elites. For those familiar with this story, it is hard to perceive O’Rourke’s staunch opposition to the use of eminent domain for the border wall as anything but disingenuous.

O’Rourke represents the run-of-the-mill milquetoast centrism that drives the Democratic Party, as he ran for Congress on cuts to Social Security, voted to fast-track negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership once in the House, and waffled on Medicare for All in his more recent campaigns for higher office. But what’s especially interesting about his political career is how, from its beginning, it epitomizes how the right-wing elements of the Democratic Party have failed Latinos.

On the one hand, neoliberal rhetoric on immigration is certainly more humane when put up against that of Republicans. But when it comes to how policies impact people of Mexican origin on the ground, there are minute differences at best between the two major parties. For example, O’Rourke has a markedly conservative congressional voting record in which he even supported a law put forth by the Trump administration that eliminated screening requirements for hiring Customs and Border Protection officers.The Future for Latinos Under Bipartisan RacismIf the trajectory of O’Rourke’s political career is any indication of what kind of president he would be, his candidacy doesn’t bode well for low-income Latinos. While he has made immigration and issues facing the border his bailiwick, it is unclear how his policies would deviate from the Obama administration that contributed to the widespread criminalization and deportation of immigrants.

The fascistic policies of the Trump administration regarding immigration are undoubtedly an amplification of what previous administrations have done, but they are by no means a deviation. For Latinos in the borderlands now facing incarceration and violence at the hands of the anti-immigrant maelstrom that has loomed for generations, it brings little hope that a presidential candidate from El Paso built his career by supporting efforts to eradicate low-income Mexican communities from the city that he so publicly venerates.

When genocide takes the form of mass murder, it is obvious and easy to name. For a politician to assume a very vocal opposition to that slaughter and the rhetoric that brought it on is a low bar in the fight against white supremacy.

The annihilation of poor Latinos from El Paso is, unfortunately, nearly as old as the city itself, as practically every generation has seen similar struggles played out over the past century. Violence against the city’s Mexicans has come in many forms — the divestment of resources, expulsion from homes, deportation, internment and now, racially motivated killing.

The recent shooting is simply the latest in the continual onslaught that low-income people of color have experienced throughout El Paso’s history. What’s more, it was brought on by words and policies that are certainly an exaggeration of what has come before but are by no means an aberration.

If Democrats hope to fight the Trump administration’s brutal policies, they would do well to atone for their own history and understand the relationship that white supremacy has with class warfare. It has not been racist rhetoric alone that has gotten us to this point, and it will take a lot more than condemnation of hateful words to improve the conditions of Latinos in years to come.

another corporate democrat???

Kamala Harris to Snub Climate Forum in Favor of Big Donors

BY Eoin Higgins, Common DreamsPUBLISHED August 20, 2019

I​n the space of 24 hours, Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat running for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, made clear that when forced to choose between the interests of the donor class or progressives, she’d choose the former.

On Sunday night, as Bloomberg reported, Harris attended a big money fundraiser in the Hamptons, telling the superrich attendees “I believe in capitalism” and that she wasn’t “comfortable” with a comprehensive Medicare for All plan.

Bloomberg’s reporters set the scene:Teslas and Maseratis lined the street as Kamala Harris greeted guests sipping drinks from plastic cups with her name on them and eating cinnamon sugar donuts from Dreesen’s at a fund-raiser hosted by movie executive Jamie Patricof and his wife Kelly as the summer of Democratic fund-raisers rolled on in East Hampton.

​Harris was the only candidate of the nine who reached the threshold to participate in the forum todecline the invitation, a decision that was sharply criticized by climate advocates.

“We need a leader who prioritizes the future of humanity over rubbing elbows with millionaires and billionaires,” environmental group Sunrise Movement said in a disapproving tweet reacting to the news about the forum.

​The climate controversy came on the heels of sustained criticism Monday over Harris’ healthcare comments.

Harris’ position on the issue has changed since she first cosponsored a Medicare for All bill with her 2020 rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) two years ago and again this April.

According tocomments provided to The Daily Beastby the Harris campaign, the senator told donors that Sanders’ bill was one of a number of “good ideas” that she had signed onto over the years.

“I support Medicare for All,” Harris told donors. “But as you may have noticed, over the course of the many months, I’ve not been comfortable with Bernie’s plan, the Medicare for All plan.”

​As a chorus of criticism over the remarks grew louder Monday, Harris press secretary Ian Sams attempted to spin the decision to change course as a pivot from his candidate.

“She has her own healthcare plan,” said Sams. “So yeah, not a secret she isn’t running on Bernie’s plan anymore.”

AsJacobinwriter Luke Savagenoted, Sams’ comments were a “remarkable use of the word ‘anymore.'”Sams latertoldThe Daily Beastthat Harris “was hearing from lots of voters real concerns, specifically about proactively abolishing private insurance, the four year transition, middle class tax hikes, and so she came up with her own plan to adjust for those that, frankly, is better than his.”

Harris, whose polling ismiredin the high single digits, briefly reached 15 percent in early July after a strong debate performance. That temporary bump has receded back to around eight and seven percent.

After an article by ProPublica and American Banker examining how the DOJ softened settlements with RBS and Barclays, the presidential candidate blasts settlements that let banks “evade accountability.”

​Sen. Elizabeth Warren is demanding information from the Justice Department about actions that Trump administration officials took last year to reduce the penalties against two large banks that sold faulty mortgages to investors in the run-up to the financial crisis.

“These weak settlements send a clear message to financial institutions and white-collar criminals that they can evade accountability as long as they are wealthy and well connected,” wrote Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, in a letter Monday to Attorney General William Barr. “It is unconscionable that the Administration is refusing to hold corporate criminals fully accountable for their role in the financial crisis.”

Political appointees at the DOJ’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., overruled the judgments of staff prosecutors who wanted Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland to pay substantially higher penalties than they ultimately did, according to a storypublished earlier this month by American Banker and ProPublica. Warren, who is running for president, cited that article in her letter to Barr.

Warren requested copies of emails between high-level officials at Main Justice, as the department’s headquarters is known, and lawyers for the two banks. She also asked Barr to hand over written communications between Main Justice and the U.S. attorney’s offices in Boston and Brooklyn, which separately handled the two cases. And she asked the attorney general to explain whether officials from Main Justice gave suggestions, recommendations or orders to staff prosecutors.

A DOJ spokeswoman said Monday that the department has received Warren’s letter and is reviewing it. Both settlements were finalized before Barr became attorney general in February.

Neither Barclays nor RBS immediately responded to a request for comment. In the original article by American Banker and ProPublica, an RBS spokesperson said the bank had requested “fairness and parity” from the Justice Department.

Warren sent similar letters Monday to the U.S. attorney’s offices in the District of Massachusetts and the Eastern District of New York, seeking more information about the involvement of officials from Main Justice. Spokespeople for those two offices declined to comment.

The cases originated during the Obama administration and involved accusations that the banks misled buyers of residential mortgage-backed securities prior to the 2008 crisis. Mortgages that went into the two banks’ securities lost a total of $73 billion, according to calculations used by the government.

The Barclays case settled in March 2018 for $2 billion, far less than what staff prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York had been seeking. The RBS case settled five months later for $4.9 billion, about half of the amount sought by staff prosecutors in the District of Massachusetts, who were also overruled on the question of whether criminal charges should be filed.

The Aug. 2 story by ProPublica and American Banker, which cited four people familiar with the settlements, detailed how the two banks hired former high-level DOJ officials who gained access to officials at the top levels of the Trump Justice Department.

Under Obama, the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston was pursuing a criminal investigation of RBS, and the bank had failed in its efforts to convince DOJ political appointees in Washington to overrule that approach. But a later meeting between then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and two former deputy attorneys general who were representing RBS, Jamie Gorelick and Mark Filip, paid off for the U.K.-based bank. In the spring of 2018, Rosenstein told Andrew Lelling, the U.S. attorney in Boston, that his office could not pursue criminal charges.

In the Barclays case, staff prosecutors filed a lawsuit seeking civil penalties after settlement talks broke down during the waning days of the Obama administration. “This complaint is probably one of the more fulsome complaints I’ve ever seen,” the judge assigned to the case commented at an April 2017 hearing.

But following communications with the Barclays legal team, which included two former high-level DOJ lawyers, officials at Main Justice told the staff prosecutors to settle the case within a narrow range around $2 billion, or the negotiations would be taken out of their hands.

Specific instructions from Washington regarding the two settlements came in spreadsheets that listed dollar ranges, according to sources familiar with the matter. Warren is asking Main Justice and the U.S. attorney’s offices in Brooklyn and Boston for copies of those spreadsheets.

“The 2008 financial crisis cost the American economy over $22 trillion, robbing millions of families of their homes and savings in the process,” Warren wrote in the letter to Barr. “A decade later, not a single big bank CEO has gone to jail, white-collar enforcement actions have hit a 20-year low, and former government officials running through the revolving door to cash in are still helping the banks responsible for the crash avoid the consequences.”RELATED: ​How Trump’s Political Appointees Overruled Tougher Settlements With Big Banks​After talks with well-connected lawyers for Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland, senior Justice Department officials in Washington last year told career prosecutors who’d been investigating the banks’ misdeeds to settle for less than they wanted.

Bernie Sanders Just Promised to Cut the Nation’s Prison Population in Half

The senator rolled out his new criminal justice plan on Sunday.

Samantha Michaels - Mother Jones8/18/19

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) unveiled his plan to reform the criminal justice system on Sunday, with proposals to cut the country’s incarcerated population in half, ban private prisons, legalize marijuana, and end mandatory minimum sentencing, solitary confinement, and the federal death penalty.

“America’s prisons are hotbeds of human rights violations, torture, sexual assault, and wrongful imprisonment,” he wrote in the plan, which was published on his campaign website of ahead of a campaign event in Columbia, South Carolina, scheduled for Sunday afternoon. “We must put an end to this barbarism and respect the rights of all human beings and treat them with basic dignity.”

​​But Sanders’ plan is among the most comprehensive, in part because it proposes to restore voting rights to all incarcerated people, an idea Sanders first put forward earlier this year at a CNN town hall. Other candidates have been more timid on this issue, focusing on expanding the franchise to people only after they finish their sentences.

In addition to ending private prisons, whose profits have soared under President Trump, Sanders says he will:

Stop charging people for prison phone calls;

Audit prison commissaries to ensure they are not price-hiking (something that Warren has also proposed);

End cash bail, a practice that disproportionately keeps low-income people locked up ahead of their trials;

Vacate past marijuana convictions, something that could help communities of color, who are disproportionately prosecuted for these drug crimes; and,

Legalize safe injection sites and needle exchange programs.

Sanders also calls for an end to prison gerrymandering, a common practice whereby states count incarcerated people as residents of the town where their prison is located, rather than where they are from, reducing representation in their communities.

Sanders’s plan is no less ambitious on policing. He wants to establish national standards for use of body cameras and for when police can deploy force, a response to public outrage over police killings of unarmed people of color. He also wants to require the Justice Department to review all officer-involved shootings, a major departure from the Trump administration. (Former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, another Democratic candidate, has also called for national standards on police force and for more thorough investigations of officer-involved shootings, as part of a police reform plan that is perhaps even more detailed.)

​Echoing proposals by Sen. Kamala Harris, Sanders is also calling for higher pay to public defenders, who represent people without money to hire their own attorney, but who are currently underpaid and overwhelmed, with some juggling hundreds of felony cases a year. As part of that proposal, Sanders wants to cancel their student debt. His plan also suggests reinstating the federal parole system, which would allow people to spend less of their sentences in prison, and to expand the use of halfway houses, which the Trump administration has sent fewer people to. Other priorities in his plan include ending the national rape kit backlog, preventing children younger than 18 from being tried in adult courts, and guaranteeing a living wage to all incarcerated workers, many of which currently make mere pennies on the hour.

The senator unveiled his plan during a weekend of campaigning in South Carolina, an early voting state where the majority of Democratic voters are African American.

Biden suffer from foot-in-mouth disease??

Joe Biden Catches Heat After Saying ‘Poor Kids Are Just as Bright’ as White Children

By Tanasia Kenney - Atlanta Black Star​August 9, 2019

​Presidential candidate Joe Biden suffered yet another verbal gaffe on the campaign trail Thursday while addressing a crowd of mostly Asian and Latino voters.​The Democratic frontrunner was speaking at a town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, for the Asian & Latino Coalition when he declared that “poor kids are just as bright, just as talented as white kids.”

After a brief pause, he quickly added: “Wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids, no I really mean it, but think how we think about it.”

The blunder came as Biden, 76, was discussing race and education as part of a four-day campaign swing in the Hawkeye State. He also spoke at the Iowa State Fair earlier in the day.

“We have this notion that somehow if you’re poor, you cannot do it,” he said. “We think how we’re going to dumb it down. They can do anything anybody else can do, given a shot.”

Though the former VP tried his best correct the Freudian slip, the damage was already done — and backlash was swift.

Biden’s campaign has been peppered with embarrassing slip-ups. Just hours before the Asian & Latino Coalition event, the presidential hopeful stuck his foot in his mouth at the state fair, telling the crowd “we choose science over fiction, we choose truth over facts.” He also recently confused the locations of the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings with Houston and Michigan.

​The harshest criticism came last month when Biden, 76, was accused of boasting about his work with “proud” segregationists, remarks he refused to apologize for despite outcry from several African-American leaders, including Sens. Cory Bookerand Kamala Harris.

“Apologize for what?” Biden said at the time. “There’s not a racist bone in my body. I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career. Period.”

Sanders and Warren defend progressive policies against attacks in U.S. Democratic debate

John Whitesides, Jarrett Renshaw - Reuters​7/31/19

DETROIT (Reuters) - Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders offered an unabashed defense of their progressive policies during a Democratic presidential debate on Tuesday, as their more moderate rivals criticized their proposals as unrealistic and politically untenable.

The debate frequently pitted the two U.S. senators against the other eight candidates on stage, with healthcare and immigration policy highlighting the divisions between the two camps.

On the first night of back-to-back debates, Democrats were united in stressing the urgency of defeating Republican President Donald Trump in the November 2020 election. But they delivered bruising critiques of their party rivals’ positions as detailed policy disagreements dominated the nearly three-hour event.

The dispute between the moderate and liberal wings of the Democratic Party highlighted the central question of the nominating contest: Which candidate in the field of more than two dozen would be best positioned to beat Trump next year?

The moderate wing, led at times by Montana Governor Steve Bullock, argued Democrats risk losing voters after moving too far to the left in the opening debate last month in Miami.

“Watching that last debate, folks seemed more concerned about scoring points or outdoing each other with wish-list economics than making sure Americans know we hear their voices and will help their lives,” said Bullock, who emerged as a forceful voice in his first presidential debate.

In contrast, progressives argued their policies would excite voters and allow them to draw a distinct contrast to Trump.

Warren rebuked former U.S. Representative John Delaney, who often played the role of foil to the progressives during the debate, firing back at his criticism of her policies.

“I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” she said.

Sanders also bristled at arguments that his proposals could not be realistically achieved, saying: “I get a little bit tired of Democrats afraid of big ideas. Republicans are not afraid of big ideas.”

Trump has been eager to paint the entire Democratic field as socialists, seeking to make any eventual nominee unsavory for voters by arguing Democrats want to raise taxes, open the U.S. borders and take away private healthcare.

Trump’s campaign spokeswoman echoed that sentiment in a statement about the debate on Tuesday night, calling the field “radical Democrats” with a “socialist message.”

Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, encouraged his party to ignore Trump’s inevitable criticism.

“If we embrace a far-left agenda, they’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists,” he said. “If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists.”

HEALTHCARE, IMMIGRATIONAs the front-runners in polls among the candidates debating on Tuesday, Sanders and Warren vowed not to attack each other, but needed to distinguish themselves in their bid to gain ground on the leader in the race, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Instead, they often found themselves teaming up to defend policy positions they share instead of drawing contrasts.

The first section of the debate centered on a dispute about the future of the U.S. healthcare system, and whether Democrats should embrace Medicare for All proposals that would have the government take over the health insurance industry.

Democrats have made access to affordable healthcare one of their defining issues as the Trump administration has worked to chip away at former Democratic President Barack Obama’s signature 2010 Affordable Care Act.

Delaney attacked the Medicare for All proposal that has been put forward by Warren and Sanders, arguing Americans who like private insurance should be able to keep it.

“Why do we have to be the party of taking something away from people?” said Delaney.

He pointed to Warren and Sanders: “They are running on telling half the country that your health insurance is illegal.”​

Warren interjected to defend a government takeover of health insurance.

“We’re not trying to take healthcare away from anyone. That’s what Republicans are trying to do,” she said.

Sanders, who has introduced a Medicare for All bill in the U.S. Senate, said: “Healthcare is a human right, not a privilege. I believe that, I will fight for that.”

The candidates also differed on immigration policy - disagreeing on whether illegal border crossings should be decriminalized.

“You don’t have to decriminalize everything,” Bullock said. “What you have to do is to have a president in there with the judgment and the decency to treat someone that comes to the border like one of our own.”

Warren disagreed, saying: “We need to expand legal immigration, we need to create a path for citizenship not just for dreamers but for grandmas and for people who have been working here in the farms and for students who have overstayed their visas.”

“You are playing into Donald Trump’s hands,” Bullock said.[...]

op - ed: How Biden’s Secret 2002 Meetings Led to War in Iraq

BY Jim Bronke, TruthoutPUBLISHED July 28, 2019

E​ven though former Vice President Joe Biden’s favorability has declined following the first Democratic debate, he remains largely considered the frontrunner by many mainstream media outlets and pundits for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Early in the first debate, Sen. Bernie Sanders mentioned how Biden had supported the Iraq War and that he had voted against it. Biden responded that he now wanted to see the U.S. out of Afghanistan. Yet Biden’s role was more sinister than that.​In 2002, Biden was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Following 9/11, he conducted the “Hearings to Examine Threats, Responses and Regional Considerations Surrounding Iraq” on July 31 and August 1, 2002.

At the time, Biden classified the meeting as secret and did not allow public review or attendance. The media largely did not cover this meeting. With the exception of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone (a committee member), the people invited to attend and give a submission were not on record as being against the war. Notably absent from the hearing was Scott Ritter, the former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq.

In September 2002, Biden spoke before the Senate and made a case for war against Iraq. He followed that with a nearly one-hour Senate discourse supporting the war on October 9, 2002. It was Biden’s inference in this Senate presentation that suggested Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threat in mainstream discourse.

When the transcript of the September 2002 Senate meeting first became available, I downloaded it. As someone who had worked on weapons systems and had as high as a top-secret clearance, I had experience with infrared missiles, inertial reference navigation systems, global positioning systems and radar for use in both military vehicles and ground-firing howitzers, as well as conventional and nuclear missiles and bombs. I also had unrestricted access to the classified library of the U.S. Navy and knew of other proposals in the military by U.S. defense industries. I figured that if there were to be anyone qualified to assess a threat, I was certainly in the running.

So I downloaded the file in October 2002 and set about to read the 275-page document word by word. I easily spent a couple of weeks doing it. Review of the entire transcript revealed there was no real evidence whatsoever that Iraq was a threat to the U.S. or was in possession of WMDs. Shouldn’t we expect a reference to satellite data, perhaps? Or discussions about facilities that inspectors were being kept from? Or maybe special nuclear sensors that had tripped?

Nothing in the transcript provided any evidence that Iraq was a threat. It was all historical and conjecture about the meaning of Saddam Hussein’s speeches. Nothing technical was even mentioned that required my familiarity with weapon systems. Instead, words and meeting dialogs that Hussein had with his engineers were interpreted as evidence that he had WMD and that his engineers were motivated to the extreme.

For example, Khidir Hamza, once Iraq’s leading nuclear physicist, discussed posturing by Hussein regarding weapons inspectors as validation of WMD. He also referred to Hussein’s past experience with chemical weapons and alleged purchase of radioactive materials. Hamza had retired from the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission in 1989 and left Iraq in 1994.

Biden conducted a secret meeting in which his star witness hadn’t been in Iraq for eight years. He concluded Iraq was a threat in spite of evidence to the contrary. The mainstream media cooperated by not even reviewing the transcript of this meeting at the time.

Can we trust someone in the White House who so irresponsibly pushed the U.S. down the path for war and irreversibly tarred our image on the world stage as a nation that did not follow the rule of law?​

The Vermont senator’s announcement came days after campaigns filed their second quarter finance reports, which showed that a number of the 2020 presidential candidates, including Sanders, had accepted contributions from healthcare and pharmaceutical executives.

The pledge states that Sanders will not take “contributions over $200 from the PACs, lobbyists, or executives of health insurance or pharmaceutical companies.” During the second quarter, his campaign received thousands from these donors, including a $2,800 contribution from a lobbyist at Beacon Health Options, $2,000 from the CEO of Ironwood Pharmaceuticals and $1,000 each from two Pfizer executives, according to an OpenSecrets review of FEC filings.

Sanders, whose campaign has said it will refund past contributions that do not comply with the pledge, was not the only candidate to receive contributions from the healthcare industry during the second quarter.

FEC filings suggest that most of the 2020 Democratic hopefuls received at least one contribution from a healthcare or pharmaceutical executive. One executive at Missouri health insurer Centene gave at least $1,250 each to Sanders, South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and former Vice President Joe Biden.

Contributions from the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries nonetheless make up a miniscule fraction of the money raised by Democratic presidential hopefuls. Combined, the 2020 Democrats have raised less than $600,000 from those in the two industries — less than 1 percent of the total haul so far.

None of the candidates have received a dollar in PAC contributions from the health-related industries — and likely won’t because they are all rejecting corporate PAC contributions entirely. Those who have pledged to reject lobbyist contributions have mostly kept their word as well.

No Democratic candidate has pulled in more from the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries than Biden, who raised more than $97,000. The former vice president took in more than $11,000 from affiliates of industry giant Blue Cross/Blue Shield, including the maximum $2,800 from Daniel Hilferty, CEO of Independence Blue Cross who sits on the board of a major health insurance trade group that is fighting to defeatSanders’ Medicare for All healthcare plan.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) rounds out the top three, taking more than $65,000. She’s received $39,000 from employees at Medtronic, the world’s largest medical device company that has its U.S. headquarters in Minnesota, as well as the maximum $2,800 from executives at private insurers UnitedHealthcare and Medica.

Biden and Klobuchar have panned Sanders’ healthcare plan as being unrealistic at this time, introducing their own proposals to instead incrementally expand healthcare coverage and reduce drug prices.Harris, along with Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), is among the cosponsors of Sanders’ Medicare for All bill in the Senate, though all three have said they don’t support the Vermont senator’s proposal to eliminate private health insurance.

Gillibrand, who was criticized by progressive groups earlier this year for attending a fundraiser hosted by Pfizer executive Sally Susman, has received $39,500 in contributions from the healthcare industry this election cycle.

Booker announced in 2017 that he would put a “pause” on taking contributions from pharmaceutical companies after accepting $161,000 from their PACs during the 2014 election cycle. The New Jersey senator has stuck to his promise not to accept corporate PAC money during his presidential run. But he has taken $35,000 from healthcare industry employees, including a $2,800 contribution from a GlaxoSmithKlineexecutive during the second quarter.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has received plenty of contributions from the healthcare industry over the years despite her endorsement of Medicare for All and her call to send executives to jail for their role in the opioid crisis. Between 2013 and 2018, she took $428,395 from healthcare-related industries. Although the Massachusetts senator has eschewed traditional fundraisers during her presidential run, she has received $44,000 in contributions from the same industries this cycle.

​Sanders has said Democrats “can’t change a corrupt system by taking its money,” arguing that healthcare industry lobbying and campaign contributions have corrupted Washington to the point where it can maintain the status quo.

Notably, Sanders’s pledge omits contributions from hospitals, an industry that also opposes his healthcare plan. Private hospitals have organized to defeat Medicare for All, which would steeply cut down on the industry’s revenue by paying out less money than private insurers.

Although they don’t often agree on much, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and insurers are working together to stop Sanders’ proposed healthcare plan from gaining even more traction within the Democratic party.

Tim Reid - Reuters​JULY 16, 2019 / 3:04 AM / UPDATED 6 HOURS AGO

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris unveiled a plan on Tuesday to crack down on pharmaceutical companies which overcharge for prescription drugs, making her the latest 2020 White House candidate to seize on the issue.

Harris, a U.S. senator from California, said her proposal would dramatically lower drug costs by allowing the federal government to set fair prices for what companies can charge and forcing them to pay rebates to consumers for medicines sold at artificially high rates.

“As President, I will not stand idly by as Americans pay thousands of dollars for prescription drugs while big pharmaceutical companies rake in massive profits,” Harris said in a statement ahead of speaking about the plan at a candidate forum in Iowa, the first state to hold a nominating contest.

“This plan puts people over profit by forcing these companies to reduce prices for consumers and holding them accountable when they gouge Americans.”

With the high cost of drugs and rising healthcare rates a pressing issue for voters, debate over the future of the U.S. healthcare system has become a focal point of the Democratic nominating contest.

Democrats exploited the issue in last year’s midterm congressional elections and believe it helped them regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives from the Republican Party.

Harris’ proposal follows plans by several of her Democratic rivals to lower drug costs, an issue they are keen to exploit after Republican President Donald Trump backed down this month from a policy aimed at getting drug companies to lower costs.

Harris was to announce her plan at one of the presidential candidate forums being held across Iowa this week by the AARP, an influential nonprofit organization that helps older Americans.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who leads the more than 20 candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, touted a plan at a forum on Monday that would repeal the law that prohibits Medicare from negotiating lower prices with drug companies.

Harris has been gaining ground on Biden in opinion polls after she delivered a strong performance at the first Democratic debate last month.

She said if elected president, she would direct the Department of Health and Human Services to set a fair price for any prescription drug that is sold for a lower price in comparable countries, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan.

A drug’s fair price would be no higher than 100 percent of the average price for that drug in other comparable countries.

In addition, all drug company profits made from selling a drug above the fair price would be taxed at 100 percent. Those taxed profits would be sent back to consumers in the form of rebates.

Drug companies found to be charging artificially high prices would receive a warning letter demanding they offer a price reduction within 30 days. Harris would also seek to force companies to import lower-cost alternatives and investigate companies overcharging consumers for prescription drugs.​

By Lauren Floyd - Atlanta Black Star​July 9, 2019

In her bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris unveiled a $100 billion plan to increase Black home ownership.

Harris revealed the plan Saturday at the Essence Festival in New Orleans and said it is part of her effort to close the wealth gap between Black and white families.

“So a typical Black family has just $10 of wealth for every $100 held by a white family,” Harris said. “So we have to right that wrong and after generations of discrimination, give Black families a real shot at home ownership, historically one of the most powerful drivers of wealth in our country.”

​Harris said the plan would help four million families with down payments and closing costs in the form of U.S. Housing and Urban Development grants.

The grants, according to the presidential hopeful’s website, would require applicants to have lived in historically red-lined communities for the preceding 10 years.

Harris defines red-lined communities as “sites of deep racial disparities in home value and lending activity.”

“So I will remove barriers that black Americans face when they go to qualify for a home loan,” she said.

Harris also plans to amend the Fair Credit Reporting Act so that it counts rent, cellphone and utility payments when considering a person’s credit score, according to her website.

Credit scores are currently based on credit cards, student loans, auto loans and mortgage payment.

“However, not all consumers have accumulated these assets,” Harris said on her website.

She added that she anticipates being able to “shrink the wealth gap between black and white households by at least one-third,” with her new plan.

“Join me as we right what is wrong and write the next chapter of history in our country,” Harris said. “The fight of Black women has always been fueled and grounded in faith and in the belief of what is possible.”

Biden is Hillary Clinton of 2020!!!

‘This is the agenda America needs’: Sanders fires back after Biden attacks Medicare for All and other progressive solutions

July 5, 2019​By Jake Johnson, Common Dreams - Raw Story

After former Vice President Joe Biden attacked Medicare for All, decriminalization of border crossings, and other major progressive agenda items during an interview that aired Friday morning, fellow 2020 White House contender Bernie Sanders responded that bold ideas will be necessary to “energize voters” and defeat President Donald Trump.

“I’m proud to be working with AOC and so many other Democrats to pass Medicare for All, debt-free college, and a Green New Deal,” Sanders tweeted, referring to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “This is the agenda America needs.”

​Biden was asked by CNN‘s Chris Cuomo whether he supports “big” ideas like tuition-free public college and student debt cancellation--two policies backed by Sanders.

“For example, I think there should be healthcare for everyone. I have a plan how to do that that’s rational, and will cost a hell of a lot less, and will work,” said Biden, who has not put out a healthcare plan.

​Biden suggested he supports allowing Americans to buy in to Medicare instead of going all the way to Medicare for All, which he slammed as disruptive and costly despite studies showing it would save the U.S. trillions of dollars in overall healthcare spending.

“If they like their employer-based insurance, which a lot of unions broke their neck to get, a lot of people like theirs, they shouldn’t have to give it up,” Biden said. “If you don’t go my way and you go their way you have to give up all that. What’s gonna happen when you have 300 million people landing on a healthcare plan. How long is that going to take? What’s it going to do?”

​On the topic of immigration, Biden said he doesn’t agree with calls to decriminalize entering the U.S. without documentation, a proposal put forth by Julián Castro and backed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

“No, I don’t,” Biden said when asked if he supports the proposal. “I think people should have to get in line, but if people are coming because they’re actually seeking asylum, they should have a chance to make their case.”

The former vice president also downplayed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) victory over Rep. Joe Crowley last year and suggested her ideas don’t have broad appeal.

“I think Ocasio-Cortez is a brilliant, bright woman, but she won a primary,” Biden said. “In the general election fights, who won? Mainstream Democrats who are very progressive on social issues and very strong on education and healthcare.”

​“As I’ve said many times,” tweetedIntercept columnist Shaun King, “every time Joe Biden opens his mouth he gets himself in trouble. It’s why this is the first interview he’s done in months.”

explaining to an ignorant man the realities of racism!!!

June 27, 2019​ By David Edwards - Raw Story

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) exchanged jabs with former Vice President Joe Biden after she accused him of of joining with segregationists to oppose bussing for students at the second Democratic presidential debate.

“I couldn’t agree more that this is an issue that is still not being talked about truthfully and there is not a black man I know, be he a relative, a friend or a coworker who has not been the subject of profiling or discrimination,” Harris said on the issue of race. “My sister and I had to deal with the neighbor who told us her parents couldn’t play with us because we were black.”

​She then turned to Biden.

“I do not believe you are a racist and I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground,” Harris stated. “But I also believe and it’s personal and it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country.”

“It was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing,” she continued. “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bussed to school every day. That little girl was me.”

Biden accused Harris of a “mischaracterization of my position across the board.”

​“I do not praise racists,” he explained. “That is not true. Number one. Number two, if we want to have this litigated on who supports civil rights, I’m happy to do that. I was a public defender. I was not a prosecutor. I left a good form to become a public defender. When in fact my city was in flame because of the assassination of Dr. King.”

This is how 2020 candidates plan to hold Big Oil accountable for climate change"Like tobacco companies, these industries have poisoned our air and polluted our planet for decades ... They must answer for that."

E.A. CRUNDEN - ThinkprogressJUN 24, 2019, 9:46 AM

Cities and states have been actively seeking to hold fossil fuel giants accountable for their role in knowingly contributing to global warming — a movement that is now seeing support from Democratic presidential contenders.

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) and Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA) have both released climate plans that would see corporations like ExxonMobil pitted against the government for contributing to climate change while concealing their internal scientific findings about the impact of emissions.

Inslee’s is particularly of note for its scope — tucked into the governor’s sweeping new climate plan released Monday is a dedicated section targeting fossil fuel companies.

As climate change becomes a hot button issue for 2020 Democratic contenders, the emerging calls for accountability could push other presidential hopefuls to similarly target major fossil fuel corporations at a time when local actors are ramping up legal efforts against Big Oil. While lawsuits seeking to assign blame for climate change have met with mixed success thus far, some environmental advocates hope that attention from presidential candidates will bolster such efforts.

Inslee told ThinkProgress that his plan would “finally hold fossil fuel corporations accountable for their pollution” and forcefully address the influence such companies have historically wielded over policymakers. Inslee also asserted that those corporations should be “liable for the harms that their climate pollution is causing” to communities nationwide.

“Like tobacco companies, these industries have poisoned our air and polluted our planet for decades without recourse,” Inslee said. “They must answer for that.”

Inslee, who has centered his entire presidential campaign around climate action, unveiled the new climate plan specifically targeting fossil fuels in advance of an appearance in the endangered Florida Everglades. The “Freedom from Fossil Fuels plan” is Inslee’s fourth major climate proposal. It calls for zeroing out more than $20 billion in subsidies from the government, among other sweeping steps. Banning new and existing fossil fuel infrastructure, imposing a “Climate Pollution Fee,” and adopting a “climate test” for any new infrastructure are also components.

And in a major step, Inslee would establish an Office of Environmental Justice under the Department of Justice (DOJ), one that would ensure “legal accountability for the climate and health damages” caused by polluters.

In 2015, documents first reported by InsideClimate News revealed that Exxon knew about the climate impacts associated with fossil fuels as early as the 1980s. Moreover, the corporation predicted in 1982 exactly how high global carbon emissions would be in 2019 — higher than ever in recorded human history.But Exxon and other fossil fuel companies kept that science from the public, even as they continued to amass wealth through the extraction and sale of fossil fuels. Moreover, they invested heavily in campaigns to spread misinformation and promote climate science denial. That effort has often been compared to similar steps taken by the tobacco industry to bury the impacts of smoking, even when companies were well aware of the dangers to human health. Ultimately, major players in the industry were taken to court and forced to pay for that deception.

“Much like lawsuits against tobacco companies in the 1990s, these suits seek to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the accelerating harms that their corporate decisions have caused and are causing in American communities,” the plan argues.

“This plan rejects any proposal to limit fossil fuel companies’ legal liabilities for the climate damages that their pollution has caused,” it states, “and for their role in misleading investors and the public about the dangers of climate change, that their own experts warned them decades ago could be ‘severe’ or even ‘catastrophic.'”

​Under Inslee’s plan, the federal government would support “states, tribes, local governments and American citizens” seeking to hold polluters accountable for climate change. The DOJ would be “empowered with the resources and discretion to support these suits” and would join them if necessary.

Inslee’s proposed Office of Environmental Justice would oversee the “aggressive pursuit of maximum civil and criminal penalties under environmental law,” with “repeat offenders” singled out in particular.

​It is largely unclear whether other Democratic presidential candidates might support similar measures. Only a few major candidates — including O’Rourke and Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) — have released climate-specific plans so far.

But O’Rourke’s climate proposal was notably the first to reference climate accountability from fossil fuel companies. His plan includes a pledge “to hold polluters accountable, including for their historical actions or crimes,” which could mean the government might pursue companies like Exxon. No plan thus far, however, goes as far as Inslee’s in detailing how a candidate would theoretically go after polluters.

Some experts say that’s a major oversight on the part of the contenders. Sharon Eubanks, a former DOJ attorney who prosecuted and won against the tobacco industry, told ThinkProgress that litigation plans to hold fossil fuel companies accountable have flown under the radar as a standard for 2020 candidates.

“This intentional spread of misinformation [by companies like Exxon] should be examined through a legal lens, and the federal government absolutely should look at potential lawsuits — and the candidates should be asked their positions on this,” said Eubanks, who now sits on the board of trustees for the Center for International Environmental Law.

Whether the idea gains traction with other presidential candidates or not, litigation against fossil fuel giants is in full swing. Since the 2015 revelations about Exxon, multiple cities, counties, and states have taken legal action against various fossil fuel corporations, including BP and Chevron. Attorneys general in New York, Massachusetts, and the U.S. Virgin Islands quickly launched fraud investigations into Exxon in 2015 and 2016. Both New York and Massachusetts have been locked in legal battles with the company ever since.

Cities like New York and San Francisco have moreover sought compensation for damages associated with climate change. Some of those efforts have met with failure; last year, judges dismissed climate lawsuits from several cities, arguing that Congress and the executive branch should have the final say over blame for global warming, not the courts.

But the lawsuits have continued unabated, with some success. In January, the Supreme Court declined to hear Exxon’s appeal of a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling allowing the state to proceed in its efforts investigating climate deception by the company. That posed a major setback for Exxon and the case is still pending.

JOE BIDEN SAYS HE CAN WORK WITH THE SENATE. THE LAST TIME HE TRIED, MITCH MCCONNELL PICKED HIS POCKETS BADLY.​Ryan Grim - The InterceptJune 24 2019, 3:00 a.m.

​AS THE YEAR 2012 wound down, Democrats hopefully eyed what looked to be one of the last opportunities for genuine legislative progress in a divided government. The party had just stomped Republican Mitt Romney at the polls in a post-Occupy campaign that centered on economic inequality. Democrats picked up two seats in the Senate, expanding their majority to 53 and adding Elizabeth Warren to their ranks. Though Democrats won more House votes nationwide and picked up a net of eight seats, Republicans held onto the newly gerrymandered lower chamber.

The hope was tied to the expiration of the tax cuts passed under George W. Bush. Republicans, despite losing the popular vote and only taking the White House in 2000 by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, moved swiftly to pass an enormous tax cut tilted heavily toward the rich. To do so, they used a parliamentary procedure that could get around the filibuster in the Senate, known as budget reconciliation. The cost of doing so, however, is that policy enacted through reconciliation must expire in 10 years’ time.

By the time the legislation was set to expire in 2010, the tea party wave had shaken up Congress. The Obama White House urged Senate Democrats to extend the tax cuts, arguing both that they had a difficult political hand, and also that extending them in an unstable economic environment was good policy. White House economic adviser Larry Summers told a private meeting of Finance Committee Democrats that allowing the tax cuts to expire would “tank the economy,” according to a Senate aide at the time.

​The ensuing negotiations would involve a whole cast of characters from throughout the White House and across the aisle in the Senate. Its resolution, though, ultimately hinged on the intervention of then-Vice President and now-leading contender for the presidency Joe Biden. He has cited his ability to work with Republicans and conservative Democrats — up to and including segregationists — as one of his top qualifications for president. This makes his role in the tax-cut fight, perhaps his most significant involvement in policymaking as vice president, critical to examine closely. And up close, it doesn’t look good.

The Senate agreed to a two-year expansion at the end of 2010, but only after Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., delivered his viral, eight-hour old-fashioned filibuster on the Senate floor to draw attention to the fiscal giveaway.

The extension meant that the tax cuts were now expiring in 2012, and in order to repeal all of them — to go over what the media began calling the “fiscal cliff” — all Congress had to do was nothing. That, Harry Reid told me in an interview for my new book, was precisely his plan. “I wanted to go over the cliff,” said Reid, the Senate majority leader at the time. “I thought that would have been the best thing to do because the conversation would not have been about raising taxes, which it became, it would have been about lowering taxes.”

In other words, let all the rates go up, and then bargain with Republicans to reduce taxes just for the middle class and the poor. Then-Minority Leader Mitch McConnell similarly knew the difficult position going over the cliff would put him in, and in preliminary talks with Reid, he agreed to let rates on people making more than $250,000 per year go back up, if to slightly lower levels to pre-Bush. (McConnell aides would later say that McConnell had not firmly conceded anything, and that negotiations weren’t finalized.)McConnell had a strong sense that Reid intended to go over the cliff and put Republicans up against a wall. Told that Reid had since confirmed that he indeed wanted to go over, a Republican operative said he found the admission unsurprising. “That’s consistent with his body language at the time,” said the operative, who wasn’t authorized to talk on the record about the negotiations. “He knew he could blame it successfully on the hard right in the Republican Party. Negotiations had reached an impasse. It wasn’t just spin, Reid was ready to go over.”

Reid felt like he had successfully pushed McConnell to the brink, buoyed by House Speaker John Boehner’s inability to get his unruly conference to agree to anything. It was now Sunday, December 30, and Democrats only had to hold out until Tuesday to find themselves in a dramatically improved political position, as the dawning of the new year would mean the tax cuts expired and automatically reverted to pre-Bush levels. At that point, it would be Republicans left pleading for rate cuts.

In desperation, McConnell reached out directly to Biden, calling him on the phone and explaining that Reid was refusing to be reasonable. Over the course of the day, McConnell and Biden struck a deal. “Biden gave Republicans everything they wanted in exchange for fixing the fiscal cliff problem,” the GOP operative recalled.

Biden, who served in the Senate from 1973 to 2009, and as vice president from 2009 until 2017, is now locked in his third Democratic primary contest for the presidential nomination. “The reason he has such good relationships with Republicans in the Senate is he never hesitates to put aside the highest priorities of his base in the interests of compromise,” the Republican operative said. “That’s also how you make life difficult in a primary.”

ON THE MORNING of New Year’s Eve, Reid was still feeling good about his position. That was until he saw McConnell take to the Senate floor and announce that he’d been in talks with the vice president, they were progressing well, and he was hopeful that they’d have legislation to move by the end of the day.

As details of the deal began leaking out, progressive Democratic senators were floored. A large group of them — including Sanders, Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Al Franken of Minnesota, and Tom Harkin of Iowa — stormed over to Reid’s office.

The deal was awful, they told Reid, and it had to be stopped. Reid told them what had happened, that it was out of his hands and that McConnell had gone around him to Biden. He said he was working on improving it and would be in touch throughout the day.

None of the senators had any business scheduled — it was New Year’s Eve, after all — so Sanders invited them back to his office in the Dirksen building. The Hart building has a popcorn machine, so Harkin asked his staff to bring some by. The crew ended up spending several hours together in Sanders’s office, thinking through potential strategies of opposition and waiting to hear from Reid.

Instead, one senator’s phone rang, and it was Joe Biden, calling to sell the deal he had cut. In classic Biden fashion, he offered a 10- to 15-minute soliloquy, a meandering argument that largely boiled down to: You can trust me; I’m your friend; this is a good deal. The senator could barely get a word in before the conversation ended.

Moments after he hung up, another cellphone rang, and it was Biden again. Unaware that the group was all together, Biden proceeded to call each of them, one after the other, delivering the same spiel. Biden’s flimsy argument, and his filibustering style of delivering it, became a running joke among the senators. “No one found it remotely persuasive,” said one person in the room.

Biden’s own characterization of his lobbying effort didn’t differ substantially from the recollection of those in the room. Asked that day by reporters what he had said to wavering senators, he replied: “I said, ‘This is Joe Biden and I’m your buddy.’”

Ultimately, it fell to Reid to drag the progressive senators into line. Once it was clear that the White House was on board with Biden’s deal, and McConnell was all in, that meant that there would be at least 70 or 80 votes for it. The progressive bloc could vote no, but it would only send a message of discord and have no effect on the outcome, Reid told them, coaxing them to support the deal he himself loathed. In the end, all the progressive senators except Harkin voted for the deal. It passed 89-8.

Years later, Reid still regrets how it went down. “If we’d have gone over the cliff, we’d have had resources to do a lot of good things in the country — infrastructure development — but it didn’t work out that way,” Reid said. Letting all the tax rates go back to pre-Bush levels would have yielded the Treasury around $3 trillion over 10 years. Instead, the deal ultimately brought in around $600 billion (or would have, if taxes hadn’t been slashed again by Republicans in 2018). Without the deal, taxes on dividend payments to the rich would have been set at 39.6 percent. Under the terms of the deal, they would be set at 20 percent, meaning that the super-wealthy would be paying lower tax rates on their passive dividend income than some working people would pay on their salaries.

I asked Reid how Biden defended the strategy that day.

“It wasn’t one that I agreed with,” he replied politely, “so you’d have to ask some of his people.”

His people declined to comment.​

The 2020 candidates finally had to answer activists’ questions about abortion. Here’s what they saidSome candidates understood that abortion intersects with class and race. One didn't even say the word abortion.

AMANDA MICHELLE GOMEZ - Thinkprogress

UPDATED: JUN 23, 2019, 9:03 AM

Reproductive freedom activists have long wanted a forum dedicated to abortion. On Saturday, they got one.

Planned Parenthood hosted 20 Democrats running for president at the University of South Carolina, where activists questioned candidates about their record and vision on the issue. During the day-long event, candidates demonstrated their understanding of abortion — whether they view it as health care and understand that it intersects with identities like gender and class.

“How are you going to expand access to sexual and reproductive health care including abortion,” audience members asked each presidential candidate, prefacing the question by sharing their own stories. They recounted their experiences, sometimes having had one abortion, sometimes three. Each story was distinct, since abortion access is predicated on each person’s life circumstance.

The backdrop to Saturday’s forum is that the right to abortion is under constant attack. In 2019 alone, nine states passed laws restricting abortion, with seven states passing near-total bans, although none are in effect. Conservatives are especially emboldened right now because they believe they will be able to use one of these bans to overturn Roe v. Wade, which established the constitutional right to abortion in 1973.

The forum gave Democrats the opportunity to directly tell voters what they intend to do to defend a right that has been chipped away at for decades. But it also gave them a chance to talk about how they would expand access.

“Let this sink in for a minute, if every one of the 13 million-plus Planned Parenthood supporters showed up at the ballot box — if we activated our network — we would be the difference in this election,” said Kelley Robinson, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

The various presidential candidates talked about their abortion proposals — that is, if they had one. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), who was the first candidate to release a plan in early May, restated her commitment to only nominating federal judges who support Roe and to codify the right to abortion into federal law.

“I will guarantee that no matter where in this country, all 50 states, you will have access to safe, legal abortion procedures,” Gillibrand told the audience.

Sen. Kamala Harris (CA) used her time to talk about a plan she announced in late May, the Reproductive Rights Act, which mimics the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by requiring states with a history of passing restrictions to get federal permission before enacting abortion laws. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), alternatively, spoke about his Medicare for All bill, which covers abortion care.

Every candidate said they’d work to protect Roe if elected president, but not everyone specified how. All of them also said they support repealing the Hyde amendment, a federal provision that bars Medicaid from paying for abortion in most circumstances. The Hyde amendment, which first passed in 1976 and passes annually through appropriations, led to one woman’s death and countless others being forced to give birth because they couldn’t afford to pay for the abortions themselves.

Not everyone has a record of supporting legislation that guarantees federal funding for abortion services. Former Rep. John Delaney (MD), for example, was never a co-sponsor of the EACH Woman Act while in Congress. The EACH Woman Act is championed by various reproductive rights and justice organizations, as it requires every federal government program that provides health care — including Medicaid — to cover abortion.

Some candidates didn’t appear as prepared as others. Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, for example, couldn’t cite specific policies when asked what he’d do to expand access to abortion, only to say ” we will use every tool and resource.” He also spoke about his own background and record in office, including supporting Planned Parenthood, when asked what he’d do to address racial disparities in health care.

“He seemed very uncomfortable,” said Laurie Bertram Roberts, an activist in the audience, told ThinkProgress.

When former Vice President Joe Biden spoke at the event, he didn’t say the word abortion — even after a veteran shared her own powerful story about when she was raped during her time in the Army. TRICARE, military insurance, wouldn’t pay for her abortion care.

“Your health care should cover your circumstance,” he told her.

Robinson also gave Biden the opportunity to speak to voters who are skeptical of his “mixed record” on abortion. Just recently Biden flipped his position on the Hyde amendment. Early in his career, as senator, Biden voted to void Roe by returning abortion rights to the states.

​“First of all, I’m not sure about the ‘mixed record’ part,” said Biden, calling his voting record “100 percent” before the mic turned off. When his mic turned back on, he pivoted to talking about health care more broadly.

​The forum wasn’t just about abortion. That’s because any discussion on the subject provides key insights into other issues, since abortion rights boil down to individual autonomy. The forum provided the candidates the opportunity to talk about class, immigration, prison reform, and voting rights — and some took advantage of the opportunity.

“What’s going on in this country right now is not just an attack on women,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA), when asked about the slew of state restrictions passed this year. “It’s an attack on women who have fewer resources. It’s a class attack on women. It’s a race attack.”

Sen. Cory Booker (NJ) told the crowd that “women that are incarcerated, undocumented immigrants that are incarcerated — they deserve to have access to health care because health care is a human right.”

Julián Castro took the opportunity to talk about transgender rights. When asked by a nonbinary activist about abortion access for transgender people, Castro — a former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development — vowed to sign the Equality Act, legislation which prohibits discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in a wide variety of areas.

Even before making any campaign promises to expand access to the LGBTQ community and to fight against the stigmas they face, Castro asked what the abortion storyteller’s preferred pronoun is — the first candidate to ask such a question during the forum.

Kamala Harris Prosecutes The Case Against Trump

Leading off the line-up of Democratic contenders at the South Carolina Democratic Convention, Senator Harris pumped up the crowd by leaning into prosecuting Trump's crimes.

By Aliza Worthington - Crooks & Liars​6/22/19 10:57am

Kamala Harris lit up the audience at the South Carolina Democratic State Party Convention this morning with a fiery speech in which she embraced her experience as a prosecutor, rather than making excuses for it. She is positioning herself to be the one to prosecute the predator in the Oval Office, and framing the American electorate as the jury to whom she must present the evidence. If her record of reducing witnesses in the Senate to liquified puddles of skin is any indication, she's got more than a fighting chance. If today's speech can be counted as her Opening Statement? Defense counsel should be quaking in their boots.

So I stand before you as a candidate for the President of the United States prepared to do our work, for helping our nation see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and see the vision of the future, respecting our past. I know that we have in this White House a president who says he wants to make America great again. Well, what does that mean? Does that mean he wants to take us back to before schools were integrated? Does that mean he wants to take us back before the Voting Rights Act was enacted? Does that mean he wants to take us back before the Civil Rights Act was enacted? Does he mean he wants to take us back before Roe v. Wade was enacted? Because we are not going back. We are not going back. We see a future. We see a future. And I'm going to tell you not only am I child of parents who were active in civil rights fighters and marchers, I also had a career as a prosecutor. So let me tell you a little bit about that. I know how to take on predators. I took on the big banks and won over $20 billion. I took on for-profit colleges and put them out of business. I took on oil companies who were polluting our environments. I took on transnational criminal organizations who were preying on women and children. I know how to get that job done. And I did it for the people. For the people. So let me tell you we need somebody on our stage when it comes time for that general election who knows how to recognize a rap sheet when they see it and prosecute the case. So let's read that rap sheet, shall we? He asked Black Americans, he said, "What do you have to lose?" Well, we know civil rights investigations are down, hate crimes are up. We had a lot to lose. Let's look at that rap sheet where he told working people that he would help them, but instead passed a tax bill benefitting the top 1% and the biggest corporations of this country. Said he would help the farmers, but passed what I call the Trump Trade Tax. Trump Trade Policy By Tweet, and now we have farmers who have soybeans rotting in bins and auto workers who may be out of their job by the end of the year. Let's look at that rap sheet where he said he would give everyone healthcare but he's still trying to rip healthcare away from folks, and turn back the clock on Obamacare. Let's talk about looking at that rap sheet where he has embraced dictators like Kim Jong-un and Putin and taken their word over the word of the American intelligence community. Let's prosecute the case. Let's prosecute that case. And let's not turn back the clock, let's start the next chapter, shall we? Let's start the next chapter. Let's turn the page.

She didn't call the Stable Genius In Chief a predator...directly, at least. She did wait a beat, though, after she said she knew how to prosecute predators, and look knowingly into the crowd to absorb their applause. THEN, she talked about beating predatory banks, oil companies, and human traffickers, signaling her allyship to the many other victims of this president's (and the GOP's) racist, misogynistic, elitist policies — victims who needs a strong advocate standing up for them.

Jason Johnson was jumping out of his skin with excitement, calling it "the best Senator Harris I have ever seen," and "the best speech she has ever given." Joy Reid summed up the craftiness of the speech, saying, "Kamala Harris, being a prosecutor has been her defining brand in a negative way. This was it in a very positive way. You can see her getting up on that stage with Donald Trump and prosecuting him live on television."

Who among us doesn't want to see someone — ANYONE — prosecute Donald Trump on live television?!?

And just because it's Saturday and we deserve this, here's your mood to take in to the rest of the day.​

​SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN, D-Mass., on Friday rolled out a plan to ban private prisons and detention facilities and stop companies from profiting off mass incarceration. The 2020 hopeful introduced the proposal ahead of her appearance at the NALEO Presidential Candidate Forum, addressing the largest gathering of Latinx policymakers in the country.

“Washington hands billions over to corporations profiting off of inhumane detention and incarceration policies while ignoring the families that are destroyed in the process,” Warren wrote in a Medium post outlining the policy. “We need to call that out for what it is: corruption. Incarcerating and detaining millions for profit doesn’t keep us safe. It’s time to do better.”

Her proposal would shut down federal private detention facilities by ending all contracts the Federal Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have with private detention providers. Private prisons have expanded significantly over the last two decades, and companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group have profited immensely from the business of incarceration. Since Donald Trump’s entry into office, and due to his administration’s aggressive immigration policies, business for private prisons is booming.

“Washington works hand-in-hand with private prison companies, who spend millions on lobbyists, campaign contributions, and revolving-door hires — all to turn our criminal and immigration policies into ones that prioritize making them rich instead of keeping us safe,” she wrote.

According to the Detention Watch Network, more than 73 percent of detained immigrants are held in facilities run by private companies. To ban the facilities in states and localities, Warren explained, federal public safety funding would be conditioned on their use of public facilities.

From 2000 to 2016, the lawmaker noted, the private prison population grew five times as quickly as the overall prison population and today, nearly 4,000 corporations rake in profits from mass incarceration.A 2016 Justice Department report found that private prisons, which subject detainees to forced labor, are significantly less safe than federal ones as contract prisons tend to have higher rates of assaults, both by inmates on other inmates and by inmates on staff.

“They violate federal rules by putting incarcerated people into solitary confinement to fit more bodies in the building,” Warren added. “They impose forced labor on immigrants just to make a buck. Multiple detainees have committed suicide. And now, under Trump, babies are getting sick and dying from their detention centers.”

​Her plan also prohibits other practices contractors use to reap profit from mass incarceration, including charging for services like phone calls and health care, steep markups on services like commissary, and charging for re-entry and probation services.

“While contractors getting paid taxpayer dollars cut corners to maximize margins, the government has turned a blind eye,” she continued. “Food companies make millions but serve bug-infested food to save cash. An investigation into a prison transport company that allowed at least five deaths and a sexual assault to occur under their watch has gone nowhere.”

A recent surge of national support has pushed Warren into second place in some surveys, polling behind former Vice President Joe Biden, who’s running as a centrist promising not to “demonize” the rich.

The latest Economist/YouGov poll showed Warren polling at 14 percent in the crowded primary, just barely ahead of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 13 percent. The poll surveyed 1,500 adults, which included 1,202 registered voters, from June 16 to 18.

June 19, 2019​ By Travis Gettys - Raw Story

​Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) blasted Joe Biden for praising two segregationist senators he’d served with as a lawmaker.

The former vice president and current Democratic presidential frontrunner reminisced about his relationship with Mississippi Democrat James Eastland and Georgia Democrat Herman Talmadge, two notoriously racist senators during the Civil Rights era, reported The Hill.

“At least there was some civility, we got things done,” Biden said, recalling that Eastland had never called him “boy.” “We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done, we got it finished.”

Booker, who is challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination, strongly criticized the former vice president in a statement.

“You don’t joke about calling black men ‘boys,’” Booker said. “Men like James O. Eastland used words like that, and the racist policies that accompanied them, to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity.”

“Frankly, I’m disappointed that he hasn’t issued an immediate apology for the pain his words are dredging up for many Americans,” the senator added. “He should.”

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio also condemned Biden’s remarks.

“It’s past time for apologies or evolution from @JoeBiden,” de Blasio tweeted. “He repeatedly demonstrates that he is out of step with the values of the modern Democratic Party.”

Joe Biden Is One of the Most Tone-Deaf Politicians in the History of Representative Government

​He paints the bullseye on his own self more artistically than anyone I've ever seen.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE - EsquireJUN 19, 2019

Wednesday is Juneteenth, the annual celebration held every 17th of June to commemorate the end of slavery in the state of Texas and, more generally, the decision by the nation, sealed in blood, that owning other human beings was no basis for a moral society. And what better way for a Democratic candidate for president in 20-freaking-19 to celebrate Juneteenth than to go before an audience of bankers and plutocrats and wax nostalgic for the days when you could "get things done" with segregationist monsters? From The New York Times:

At the event, Mr. Biden noted that he served with the late Senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, both Democrats who were staunch opponents of desegregation. Mr. Eastland was the powerful chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Mr. Biden entered the chamber in 1973. “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Mr. Biden said, slipping briefly into a Southern accent, according to a pool report from the fund-raiser. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”

“Well guess what?” Mr. Biden continued. “At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.” Mr. Biden made the comments about Mr. Eastland and Mr. Talmadge as he spoke about the need for unity, including a call for bipartisanship that has drawn derision from some liberals who don’t see room for compromise in today’s polarized Washington. “I know the new New Left tells me that I’m — this is old-fashioned,” he said. “Well guess what? If we can’t reach a consensus in our system, what happens? It encourages and demands the abuse of power by a president.”

Here, in rebuttal, is good ol' civil James Eastland in 1957:

The Southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the Reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination… Mr. President, it is the law of nature, it is the law of God, that every race has both the right and the duty to perpetuate itself. All free men have the right to associate exclusively with members of their own race, free from governmental interference, if they so desire.

Here's some more, from the Honolulu Record in 1956, when Eastland was preparing to chair a congressional committee's Red-baiting investigation into the newspaper and several Hawaiian labor organizations:

"...the pure blood of the South is mongrelized by Northern politicians to obtain political favors from Red mongrels."

"The white people of the South do not have race prejudice. They have race consciousness, and they are proud to possess this awareness of the significance of race. Had they not possessed it the South would have been mongrelized and southern civilization destroyed long ago."

"Mr. President, let me make this very clear. The South will retain segregation. The governor of a sovereign State can use the force at his command, civil and other, to maintain public order, and prevent crime and riots. He can use these forces to prevent racial integration of schools if this is necessary, under the police power of the State, to prevent disorder and riots. In fact, it is his duty to preserve order and prevent turmoil and strife within the state."

Already in the past month, Biden also has yearned for the days in which he could do civility with Strom Thurmond, at whose funeral Biden spoke, and he's treated Joy Reid with total disrespect at the Reverend William Barber's Poor People's forum. From the Washington Post:

Joy-Ann Reid, an MSNBC host who moderated the session, asked Biden how he would pass his plans through a stubborn Congress — in particular, how he would work with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who makes little secret of his satisfaction at blocking Democratic initiatives.

Biden bristled at the suggestion that his approach was misguided. As he wound through his response, Biden moved nearer to Reid, who was seated, and leaned over her. “Joy-Ann, I know you’re one of the ones who thinks it’s naive to think we have to work together,” Biden said. “The fact of the matter is, if we can’t get a consensus, nothing happens except the abuse of power by the executive branch. Zero.” He added that “you can shame people into doing the right thing.”Here with a rebuttal is an actual concept: President Donald J. Trump. Here with another rebuttal is a sadly imaginary concept: Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland. Damn, Joe. You were there, my dude. You were doing more than just putting on the Ray-Bans in viral videos.

Meanwhile, at the same feast of fat things in New York on Tuesday night, Biden reassured the assembled plutocrats that he considers them the real victims of scurrilous attacks.

Mr. Biden’s appearance at the Carlyle was his third fund-raiser of the day. There and at previous stops, he implicitly suggested that bold actions on a range of issues could be achieved without anyone being “punished,” including the wealthy. “I got in trouble with some of the people on my team, on the Democratic side, because I said, ‘You know what I’ve found is rich people are just as patriotic as poor people,’” he said. “Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money.”

Well, that's true. It is unfair to demonize the minimum wage worker who just cleared your table, Joe. He "makes money." But the guys who wrecked the entire economy and then got rich selling off the ruins, and who are preparing to do it again? They should roast in hell on the next spit over from James Freaking Eastland.

Joe Biden would be a better president than the one we have now. But I'm not sure everyone has a grasp on how very low that bar is. However, and especially on the campaign trail, Joe Biden also is consistently one of the most tone-deaf politicians in the history of representative government. He paints the bullseye on his own self more artistically than anyone I've ever seen. Maybe that's part of his charm.

Who's leading the "Wall Street primary"? Looks like Biden, Harris and Buttigieg

"It can't be Warren and it can't be Sanders," a bank CEO says — but donations are flowing in to other Democrats

​JAKE JOHNSON - SalonJUNE 18, 2019 10:00AM (UTC)

H​aving already determined that two of the top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination — Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — are unacceptable and must be stopped at all costs, Wall Street financiers have reportedly begun to narrow down their list of 2020 favorites as candidates' fundraising efforts reach a "fevered peak" ahead of the June filing deadline.

As the New York Times reported on Sunday, "three candidates are generating most of the buzz" among powerful Wall Street donors: South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.

​"[W]hile many are still hedging their bets, those who care most about picking a winner are gravitating toward Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, while donors are swooning over Mr. Buttigieg enough to open their wallets and bundling networks for him," according to the Times, which interviewed two dozen top fundraisers and political advisers.

"This should tell you everything you need to know," environmentalist and documentary filmmaker Josh Fox tweeted in response to the Times report. Fox has been an outspoken backer of Sanders and done work for his 2020 campaign.

According to the Times, Wall Street donors opening their wallets for the 2020 race are attracted to Biden's "ideological moderation," Buttigieg's "charisma and intellect," and Harris' "potential as a possible primary victor even as she now trails in the polls."

​"Those are the three," said Julianna Smoot, who served as national finance director for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, which raked in an unprecedented sum of Wall Street cash. "If you could roll all three of them into a single candidate, you'd have the perfect candidate."

In a frenzied rush to raise as much money as possible ahead of the June 30 financial filing deadline, "no less than nine Democrats are holding New York fundraisers in a span of nine days," the Times reported.

The Times provided a glimpse of some of the big-money events taking place over the next several days:

Hamilton E. James, the executive vice chairman of Blackstone and a top fundraiser, hosted Mr. Buttigieg at his home on Thursday. The short-selling hedge fund manager James Chanos will hold an event for Mr. Biden on Monday. And on Tuesday, Marc Lasry, the hedge fund manager and co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, is gathering checks for Ms. Harris. Co-hosts of that event include Blair W. Effron, an investment bank co-founder and an influential Democratic financier, and Ray McGuire, vice chairman of Citigroup.

Among those spreading the money around is Brad Karp, the chairman of the Paul, Weiss law firm and a top attorney for Wall Street institutions. He is hosting Mr. Biden for a reception at 9 am on Tuesday; he is a co-host for a "lawyer's lunch" for Ms. Harris that same day.

Not all 2020 presidential candidates are taking the same approach to funding their campaign operations.

As Biden, Buttigieg, Harris and other 2020 contenders race from one big money event to the next, Warren and Sanders — both critics of Wall Street's political influence — are rejecting lavish fundraisers hosted by corporate executives and instead relying on small-dollar donations and "grassroots" events.

"Two candidates in the top tier of polls, Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have railed against the financial industry," the Times reported, "and opted against the kind of fancy fundraisers with catering and $2,800 admission prices that lubricate the donor industry."

As Common Dreams reported in January, Wall Street bankers made clear how they felt about the possibility of a Warren or Sanders nomination before they even launched their 2020 campaigns.

"It can't be Warren and it can't be Sanders," the CEO of a big bank anonymously told Politico.

While Biden, Buttigieg, and Harris have emerged as early Wall Street favorites, they're not the only candidates who have sparked interest.

David Adelman, an attorney who represents the financial industry, told the Times that he feels a "generational pull" toward Beto O'Rourke.

​"It's important to rotate the crops," said Adelman.

Wall Street bankers have also donated to Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., according to the Times.

In response to the new reporting on 2020 Democrats' aggressive Wall Street fundraising push, Astead Wesley — national political reporter with the Times — tweeted a question at the candidates:

Shane Goldmacher✔@ShaneGoldmacherNEW: Top Wall Street donors are beginning to pick favorites in 2020 and the $$$ is flowing to Buttigieg, Biden and Harris.

My piece inside the June gusher — we're in the midst of 9 candidates in NY in 9 days — and the millions at stake: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/us/politics/2020-democratic-donors-wall-street.html …2:38 PM - Jun 16, 2019

compromise with a terrorist group?

Obama team frustrated by Biden’s appeals to bipartisanship

June 12, 2019By Matthew Chapman - Raw Story

​Former Vice President Joe Biden has set himself apart from many of his fellow Democratic presidential candidates by promising to restore bipartisanship in Washington — and he swears that once Trump is gone, Republicans themselves will jump at the chance to work with him. “These folks know better,” he said at a recent campaign event. “They know this isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing.”

It remains to be seen whether Biden truly believes this or he is simply calculating that voters want to hear it. And there is some polling evidence that many of them do — Quinnipiac finds Democratic voters prefer a candidate who will “work with” Republicans by a 13-point margin.

​On the other hand, according to The Daily Beast, there is one group of people who certainly don’t want to hear it: Biden’s fellow alumni of President Barack Obama’s administration.

“Right on. Mitch McConnell and Mark Meadows will rush to form the Woke Caucus. And Nelson Rockefeller will be revived from his grave,” said former Obama campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt sarcastically.

Another unnamed senior aide had a blunter response to Biden’s vision: “Fuck no.”

Biden’s lengthy Senate career was full of bipartisan negotiation on major issues ranging from the budget to criminal justice. But it seems hard to imagine that Republicans would be chomping at the bit to work with him as a president, given that Obama spent eight years extending the GOP olive branches and Republicans spent eight years burning them.

While Biden was vice president, Republicans repeatedly stonewalled the most modest policy goals on health care, guns, and the environment; shut down the government; threatened to block the Treasury from paying the debt; and conducted years-long sideshow investigations of Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s emails. Perhaps most fresh in progressive activists’ minds, they stole a Supreme Court seat from Obama — and falsely claimed that Biden himself had set the precedent to let them do it.

All of this was the norm before Trump took office, and it will almost certainly be the norm after — whether or not Biden is the next president.

​AS VICE PRESIDENT,Joe Biden repeatedly sought to undermine the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, working in alliance with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to push for a broad exemption that would have left millions of women without coverage.

Biden’s battle over contraception is a window into his approach to the politics of reproductive freedom, a function of an electoral worldview that centers working-class Catholic men over the interests of women. The issue has been causing his presidential campaign some discomfort — on Wednesday, Biden’s campaign clarified that he remains a supporter of the so-called Hyde Amendment, a provision that bars federal money from being used to fund reproductive health services. Biden had recently told an activist with the ACLU that he opposed the amendment, and wanted to see it repealed.

​On contraception, according to contemporaneous reporting and to sources involved with the internal debate, Biden had argued that if the regulations implementing the Affordable Care Act were going to mandate coverage, it would anger white, male Catholic voters, and threaten President Obama’s reelection in 2012. Biden’s main ally in the internal fight over contraception was Chief of Staff William Daly; both men are Catholic.

Opposing Biden was a faction of mostly women advisers, joined by some men, who argued that Biden had both the policy and the politics wrong. On policy, they noted that if his broad exemption went into effect, upwards of six million women who happened to be employed by religious-affiliated organizations would lose contraception coverage. The politics were just as bad, they argued, given that women were increasingly becoming central to the party’s success. To turn on them on the issue of access to birth control — embracing a fringe position not even adopted by most Catholics who aren’t bishops — would put that support at risk.

Biden has long said that he is personally opposed to abortion, but supports the legal right. His support of Roe v. Wade has not always been full throated.

“When it comes to issues like abortion, amnesty, and acid, I’m about as liberal as your grandmother,” Biden said in a June 1974 article. “I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”

Because Biden’s anti-Roe comments came so long ago — more than four decades — some have argued they are of little value in gauging his current politics. But his battle against contraception, and his unwillingness to join the bulk of the Democratic field and call for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, puts him dramatically out of step with today’s party.

Biden is so out of step, in fact, that when he was shown polling data during the contraception fight, he dismissed it as inaccurate. He has a view of the American electorate’s politics on abortion that can’t be influenced by new facts. Jake Tapper, then reporting for ABC News, reported in February 2012:

​The two sides couldn’t even agree about what they were debating. In the fall, [Planned Parenthood head Cecile] Richards brought in polling indicating that the American people overwhelmingly supported the birth control benefit in health insurance. She also highlighted statistics showing the overwhelming use of birth control.

The Vice President and others argued that this wouldn’t be seen as an issue of contraception — it would be seen as an issue of religious liberty. They questioned the polling of the rule advocates, arguing that it didn’t explain the issue in full, it ignored the question of what religious groups should have to pay for. And they argued that women voters for whom this was an important issue weren’t likely to vote for Mitt Romney, who has drawn a strong anti-abortion line as a presidential candidate, saying he would end federal funding to Planned Parenthood and supporting a “personhood” amendmentthat defines life as beginning at the moment of fertilization.

​Similarly, Mike Dorning and Margaret Talev reported:” Vice President Joe Biden and then-White House chief of staff Bill Daley, also Catholics, warned that the mandate would be seen as a government intrusion on religious institutions. Even moderate Catholic voters in battleground states might be alienated, they warned, according to the people familiar with the discussions.”

It was, ultimately, public anger that led to Biden and Daley’s defeat on the issue. On January 31, 2012 as the administration was finalizing its policy, it was reported that Susan G. Komen for the Cure had cut its funding of Planned Parenthood, in a push led by abortion foe Karen Handel. The fury over the decision stunned the organization, which backtracked and apologized within a week, as Planned Parenthood raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from angered supporters of abortion rights. “We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives,” Komen said in a statement on February 3, 2012.

The White House watched the affair unfold closely, and the blowback punctured the mythology that there is no real public support for abortion rights. It also sent a signal that if the White House backtracked on access to contraception, it could expect a livid response. The exemption that was ultimately granted, on February 10, was a very narrow one, frustrating the bishops.

In his vice presidential debate with Mitt Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, Biden attempted to portray it as a broad exemption. “No religious institution — Catholic or otherwise, including Catholic social services, Georgetown hospital, Mercy hospital, any hospital — none has to either refer contraception, none has to pay for contraception, none has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide. That is a fact,” Biden said in the debate.

In a rare public disagreement with Biden, the Conference of U.S. Bishops shot back with a statement, accurately saying that Biden’s claim was “not a fact.” Indeed, many religious-affiliated entities that had hoped to win an exemption, and which had Biden’s support inside the White House, had failed. But with Biden now a front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president, they may get another shot at denying access to contraception to their employees.

Tax breaks usually go to people who own their homes. Cory Booker has another idea.Its centerpiece is a tax credit for "cost-burdened" Americans: Individuals paying at least 30% of their income on rent.​JESSICA M. GOLDSTEIN - ThinkprgressJUN 5, 2019, 1:00 PM

​Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker announced a major plan Wednesday to address the lack of affordable housing in the United States: He would provide a tax credit for renters who spend at least 30% of their income on rent. This program would affect 57 million Americans, 17 million of whom are children, according to researchers of a Columbia University study cited by Booker.

Before becoming a New Jersey senator, Booker, famously, was the mayor of Newark, and he still lives there. He has made his residence a recurring theme on the campaign trail. In a statement announcing the plan, he referred to his upbringing in Harrington Park, where his family was met with “racial discrimination” upon arriving in the predominately white Jersey town, and to “the tenants I represented against slumlords when I first moved to Newark.”

“Access to safe, affordable housing can be transformative in the trajectory of people’s lives,” Booker said. “Making sure all Americans have the right to good housing is very personal to me.”

​At the center of Mr. Booker’s proposal is the renters’ tax credit, which would cover the difference between 30 percent of a person’s income and the fair-market rent in his or her neighborhood. There would not be an income cap limiting who could qualify, according to the campaign, which said the median participating family would receive $4,800 per year.

His campaign estimated the program would cost $134 billion annually. It did not propose specifically how to pay for the plan beyond rolling back changes to the estate tax made by President Trump, which it said would raise about $25 billion annually. The remainder, the campaign said, would come from restoring various taxes that were cut in the Republican-led tax overhaul from 2017.

Booker’s plan also calls for a tenant’s right to legal counsel in the event they face eviction and for funds from federal transportation programs and community development block grants to be set aside for communities that modify their zoning laws to facilitate the construction of affordable housing.

The United States is experiencing an affordable housing crisis. In 2016, Harvard researchers found that nearly half of renters were cost-burdened — that is, spending at least 30% of their income on rent. (For context, in 1960, only 20% of renters were cost-burdened.) According to advocacy group Home11, 11 million Americans spend more than half their income on rent.

And last year, the National Low Income Housing Coalition reported that a renter working 40 hours a week, earning minimum wage, cannot afford a two-bedroom apartment without being cost-burdened in literally any county in the country. “A full-time minimum wage earner would have to work approximately 122 hours per week for 52 weeks a year to afford a two-bedroom apartment, or 99 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair-market rent.”

Booker says the renters’ tax credit, packaged with his “baby bonds” (a $1,000 bonded savings account given to every child born in America, run through the Treasury Department, to which the federal government would contribute annually), is a means of closing the wealth gap and addressing poverty. He told NJ Advance Media — which noted that Jersey is “home to six of the 10 biggest cities with the greatest percentage of renters” — that “all of my life, my politics have been about standing up for those communities who too often have been looked down upon, left behind, left out.”

op - ed: If Pete Buttigieg Is the “Opposition” to Trump, We Are Screwed

BY Daniel Uncapher, TruthoutPUBLISHED June 1, 2019

The only millennial on Earth to sincerely describe themselves as a “laid-back intellectual,” Buttigieg has made it impressively far on identity alone. His website has a meme generator, for example, but no actual platform, leaving journalists to cobble one up out of tweets and interviews.

What’s emerged in the past six months is a brazenly conservative agenda.

​To start, he doesn’t want single-payer health care because he can’t imagine a world without private insurance — one of the highest-profile symbols of the inhumanity of privatization. Instead, he wants “Medicare-for-all-who-want-it” to compete in the marketplace. “I don’t think we have to make it that complicated,” he says, sounding unnervingly like our current president.

​In April, he took it upon himself to suggest a “national service” program for every U.S. teenager. Maybe he means clean-up-your-rivers and volunteer-to-read service work, but it’s the military that swallows up his praise, and previous presidents’ time in the war machine that he idolizes. I can already see the Republicans back home in Mississippi nodding along.

It’s clear that Buttigieg is hashing some of these ideas out in real-time, and he’s quick to reassure us that international policy can come later — what matters is his work in South Bend, Indiana, where, according to his website, he “reimagined its role in the global economy” while at the same time “emphasized building a South Bend community where every resident — regardless of race, religion, gender, or orientation — could feel safe and included.”

It’s a cheap gesture for a mayor who, immediately upon taking office, fired the city’s first and only Black police chief and brought in a sales rep for a Silicon Valley surveillance firm called ShotSpotter; a mayor who gave a State of the City address with the LimeBike logo shining behind his head, boasting about the innovation he’s brought to the city, only for LimeBike to pull out its bike service within a year; a mayor who refused to publicly support an abortion clinic; a mayor who left his job once to blow up Brown people and a second time to go glad-handing with white Iowans and Bill Maher; a mayor who forcefully gentrified half of South Bend with his “1,000 Houses in 1,000 Days” initiative, fining residents who couldn’t afford to renovate their properties until the city could legally seize and demolish it.

​To be fair, few candidates have any credibility when it comes to income inequality, and virtually none of them have proven true allies to people of color. But Bernie Sanders, criticized for so constantly reminding us about his march with Martin Luther King, Jr. over 50 years ago, at least has something to point to; the best that Buttigieg can do is show off an essay he wrote in high school that dared to call Bernie Sanders “brave.”

That essay, simply titled “Bernie Sanders,” begins with a sweeping condemnation of centrism. “A new attitude has swept American politics,” wrote Buttigieg. “Candidates have discovered that it is easier to be elected by not offending anyone rather than by impressing the voters. Politicians are rushing for the center, careful not to stick their necks out on issues.”

What happened? In the Anthropocene, when political will is so valuable and there are so many all-or-nothing problems to face — capitalism, climate change, the police state — do we really have time for nationalist wet dreams like mandatory military service, or corporatist bet-hedging like “Medicare-for-all-who-want-it?”

Buttigieg’s work, personal and political, has consistently served the interests of Silicon Valley, the police and the military-industrial complex. If the only way to oust Donald Trump is with someone like Buttigieg, then the far right really has flipped the board, and the regulatory capture of any so-called opposition is already complete.

Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Help Black Students Get AheadSystemic inequality in higher education? The Massachusetts senator has a plan for that too.

ADAM HARRIS - the atlantic

“Race matters,” Senator Elizabeth Warren told me in an interview last Wednesday, “and we need to face it.” Two days earlier, Warren became the latest Democratic presidential hopeful to make the trek to North Philadelphia with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, to meet with union members. These town halls have a rhythm: Brief remarks from Weingarten, a short monologue from the candidate, and then questions from the most important people in the room: teachers. After Warren’s speech, she was pressed about the growing wall of student debt—and it drew out her higher education pitch.

The Massachusetts senator and former law professor launched into a lecture about how to reform paying for higher education, declaring that, “We need to talk about the racial dimension of this head-on.” She ran down the stats: “Students of color are more likely to have to borrow money to go to college, they borrow more money when they’re in college, and they have a harder time paying for it when they get out of college,” Warren said. There was a difference, a systemic one, she argued, and the policymakers needed to fix it.

Warren’s early 2020 platform has reflected a need to remedy that difference—and higher education is not the only arena where her policy approach addresses America’s legacy of discrimination. From housing to health care, her message, in many ways, intentionally places an emphasis on race and wealth. Candidates, in recent years, have placed an emphasis on black outreach as part of their get out the vote efforts; whether that means playing up one’s black bona fides like Senator Kamala Harris or sitting down with Al Sharpton at Sylvia's in Harlem like Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana. But what Warren is doing this spring is unique: She is offering a detailed body of policy to go alongside platitudes.

​“It’s not an accident,” Warren told me, that the road to economic security, “is even tougher and rockier for black families.” She pointed to property as an example. “Homeownership is the number-one way middle-class families build wealth, so it’s no surprise that for decades the federal government subsidized the purchase of housing for white families but denied that to black families,” she said.

Warren is making the bold wager that people will come to the polls next year motivated by policy. In survey after survey, voters suggest that policy is front of mind; reality tends to paint a much different picture. Still, Warren is also gambling simply by releasing such extensive policies—including breaking upbig tech, reforming the Department of Defense, and providing debt relief to Puerto Rico—so far in advance of the first primary caucuses. “It is risky to put out plans in as many areas which each have a constituency,” Heather McGhee, a senior fellow and the former president of Demos, a liberal think tank, told me. “But it shows a basic level of compassion for the voter.”When Warren presented her higher education policy in late April, one of seemingly countless lengthy policy proposals she has laid out this election cycle, her move to cancel student debt grabbed headlines, and rightly so. More than 40 million Americans are saddled with student debt; but it is unequally distributed among whites and people of color. As the reaction to the news of billionaire venture capitalist Robert Smith pledging to pay off the debt of Morehouse graduates showed, black borrowers are more likely to struggle with loans. That’s why, Warren says, her plan contains other notable features, namely a $50 billion fund for historically black colleges and other minority-serving institutions, and tuition-free public colleges, a wedge issue for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 run.

Black colleges have been asking federal lawmakers for more funding for years to account for more than a century of underfunding. Still, as Howard University’s president, Wayne Frederick, put it last week, the institutions “out-punch their weight class.” He pointed to a National Science Foundation studyshowing that in the time Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and MIT—with combined endowments in the tens of billions—had 221 of their black undergraduates earn doctorates in STEM fields, Howard had 220 on its own.

Several days after Warren’s initial policy was released, she added a provision to allow private historically black colleges such as Morehouse, Howard, and Dillard University, in New Orleans, to opt-in to her tuition-free model. “Black Americans were kept out of higher education, and federal and state governments poured money into colleges that served almost exclusively white students,” Warren told me. “This is a chance for African-American students to make choices on a level playing field about where they want to be in schools not driven by tuition-costs.”

​The proposals have been welcome in the black college community—even though the mechanics of how exactly the fund will operate are still a bit messy. Several candidates talk about supporting black colleges, but few have made it a plank in their policy platforms. “Any time you’re going to put more resources into a sector that has not been historically funded, it is significant,” Michael Sorrell, the president of Paul Quinn College, a historically black college in Dallas, told me. But he expressed some caution; after all, Warren’s ambitious proposals will require support from Congress, and evenmodestly routine higher education legislation has had trouble passing in the Capitol.

Other Democratic candidates have started rolling out their own proposals to address America’s continuing legacy of racial discrimination. Last weekend, Senator Bernie Sanders released his education plan, which emphasizes rectifying school segregation. Sanders calls his blueprint the Thurgood Marshall Education Plan in a nod to the lawyer-turned-Supreme-Court-justice who argued for the plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court case establishing that racial segregation in public schools was illegal. Several candidates, including Warren, Harris, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, have suggested that the federal government should study the effects of slavery and segregation to jumpstart the national conversation about reparations. Senator Cory Booker has pitched the idea of baby bonds, which would provide low-income children with a savings account of up to $50,000, a move that scholars have suggested could help close the wealth gap.

On May 17, the 65th anniversary of the Brown decision, I spoke with Lisa Cylar Barrett, director of policy at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. America’s legacy of racism, she told me, has a long tail. “We have a history in this country of racism that is undeniable; and most of that was government-sanctioned—particularly when you’re look at issues around housing and education,” Barrett said. “You can’t deny that those policies resulted in many of the inequities that we see today.” Black people in America were kept from opportunities, she lamented, and there has not been the same energy devoted to correcting the inequality as there was to establishing it.